When Is Duplicate Content Acceptable?

[mitra]

I just went thru few articles on duplicate content in the last few days and trying to gather more knowledge on it. I found a guy on my site about duplicate content. Here it is http://sublimewebdirectory.unhq.com/...tentlegal.html

Here the guy used some points where duplicate content is acceptable. I've some doubt on few points.

Can anyone put more light into it?

[Jesse Vlasveld]

I dont think duplicate content is acceptable at all.
Write your own quality unique content to achieve the best results.

[futurex]

no no way, they are not acceptable at all, if you read this Quote

content is king

then one should write there own content.
i think duplicate content is a kind of theft...

[Johan007]

don't believe futurex

I like this quote but it is not valid becuase it has no source.

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

Honest site owners often worry about duplicate content when they don't really have to...There are also people that are a little less conscientious... top level domains, like x.com, x.ca, are not a concern."

This one is more valid becuase the quoted source is mentioned. Duplicating your own content is perfectly fine.

[Natural Elements]

There are some cases when it is acceptable. For example if you own an e-commerce and sell products, to avoid server technical problems you can put the same site on a different hosting company with another domain name if you cannot lose sales.

The search engines will not penalize you, but the original site will always be listed above the duplicate site.

Now if someone duplicates your site or contents, yes search engines will penalize and put it in supplemental results right away. I have noticed when a heavy duplication of your site is made, that penalizes not only the thieves/violator of your copyrights but also your own site.

I also had someone copy my entire site via a proxy, then reported this to authorities.

[UBF]

Well you can say that duplicate content is okay if you own an authority site and the search engines therefore see you are the original and everyone else as the duplicates.

But I agree... go for your own unique content. It is so much easier

[Manish Pandey]

Originally Posted by futurex

no no way, they are not acceptable at all, if you read this Quote then one should write there own content.
i think duplicate content is a kind of theft...

And again we see this "content is king thingie"...

[jakomo]

There is not acceptable duplicate content, but sometime you are duplicate some parts of you site (like menus), you can duplicate around the 50% of YOUR content...

Best

[Ar3d]

everyone is right, its not fair for the content owner but i believe that sometimes duplicate content gets a benefits in SEs rather than to owner. the reason is that whose will be the first to cache by the SEs.. what can you say about that?

[khaty]

hope their opinions are clear to you..

[Cornbread]

I think if you quote someone:

Joe Smith said, "bla bla bla".

that should be fine because you can't change what the man said. Other than that I would say NO.

[lucia]

Duplicating your own content is acceptable when you'd like to duplicate even knowing you'll take the Google hit.

There are bloggers who post their individual blogs to their private site, but also give permission for a niche refeed blog to post the articles. Those individual bloggers take a hit on Google, but gain visitors from the niche refeed blog. They've made conscious decision to take the Google hit because they don't care what their PR is! They get more focused niche readers by permitting the refeed.

So... acceptable to the blogger. Google doesn't own the blogosphere; it's a search engine. You can do what you like with your site, and Google has every right to do what they like with their search algorithms.

[mac1234]

link not working, however duplicate content word to word is not good. However as for the menus all the site would have same as about us etc. But while putting up content on a website or blog the topics are similar and so do the content, only it is put in different words and phrases

[businessservicesuk]

As far as your website is concerned try and avoid duplicate content, however for specific businesses it is nearly impossible. Imagine how many online debt collection agencies there are. I bet if you read all their websites they will all have similar content, this is unavoidable.

I distribute my articles to around 4 sites, these could all be considered duplicate content, saying that I do not put these articles on my website.