I’ve recently read a lot of article regarding duplicate content. Every body was saying that this is bad, and google will punish you for this. Until now, I have not found any website penalized for this. (Notify me if you found one :)) Theoretically duplicate content is bad. It is some kind of plagiarism. But in this internet world, news and article are distributed so people could get the information easily. For example a news website like Reuter’s news will be distributed by thousands of people around the world. Many people also use feeds to give content to their website or blog. I’ve also seen bigfishgames.com using feeds to distribute their game list. You could find press release and write an article about it.
Do you think it is possible that google mark an article as duplicate? If so, what is their criteria of doing so? If google have 10 billion pages on their index, this means that they must compare a page with 9,999,999,999 other website. It would cost them much and I don’t think they will do it.
So my conclusion is duplicate content is very hard to deal with, and we sure need it to distribute content around the world.
