Bottom line, try as best as you can to have unique content well linked, internally and from other sites.

If you are aggregating, ask yourself how you are adding value, interest and uniqueness over and above the posts own value. For example, are you driving traffic and visibility that the authors wouldn’t attain any other way? Are there unique comments not made otherwise? Is there a good mix of republished and original content. If you are the wrong side of the 80/20% equation you will probably have to do a lot more promotion to be visible in searches.

One or two articles duplicated will not create an issue, and could in fact help promote your other content. Think of shared articles as press releases to publicise rather than attract search traffic. The only problem comes with too much dupe content, the threshold probably varies between industries and niches but if the majority of your content can be found elsewhere you have a problem.

Templates should not cause dupe issues. Make sure all your content is linked, has unique titles and at least first few paragraphs. Consider using the google sitemap service. Try to get more deep links to posts.

Hope this helps

For example, if I would post something on my site, I would also try to post a small excerpt on my LiveJournal and MySpace blogs linking back to my site. After a while, I realized that even though I was getting more traffic, my content, even in small excerpts, was available in more places than necessary. I was running my efforts thin. I then started removing all extra content from all other external sites and now have my site as the only focus point for writing my articles so far.

I was thinking about the effect of having just a few posts duplicated elsewhere in their entirely also. I participated in some essay competitions recently and had some key articles published twice: once on my site and once on the competition site. I have to look into this further, though after reading your article I guess it should be all right to have just a few articles posted in more than one spot.

Thanks for clarifying the issue.

I checked my links for my blog and I don’t have duplicate posts yet most of the posts are not coming up in the search engines – I’ve over 500 pages of content on my blog.

I am wondering if having a comprehensive template for my blog is making Google not see the page content as different even though most of my posts are over 500 words in length and pages much longer.

Have you experienced this to be the case for your blogs or do you find Google lists all your pages/posts?

1) web pages need a certain threshold of PageRank pointing to them before they are indexed in Google – plus PageRank is an easy reflection of a page’s link popularity, which in turn

So it’s not unimportant. But you’re right, as far as duplicate content is concerned, PageRank is definitely not an issue.

2) Usually with SEs the first instance of a page is considered the original. Copies may still be ranked higher though, but not because the first page got a dupe content penalty, but because the second page was more authoritative.

Duplicate content does not automatically translate into a penalty. Below a certain threshold (for a web page as well as for a site), dupe content isn’t something to ‘worry’ about.

If your whole site (or a significant portion) of it is being scrapped, keep in mind that usually these sites themselves have very poor quality links. So if you’re doing things right (flagship content and all that), you don’t have anything to worry about.

In short, cross-posting is too small a thing to be a problem, and if you do your SEO / blog marketing right you have nothing to worry about with spammers either.

If I were a content ‘publisher’ or ‘aggregator’ and I wanted to aggregate stories from different authors but still allow them to maintain their own blog – could that stifle either one of the pieces of content?

In other words, Doug writes about Ajax. I have an Ajax blog that pulls from 100 different blogs that speak to Ajax but it only pulls in articles tagged for “Ajax”… would one of the sites be penalized?

Thanks,
Doug