Busby SEO Test – Duplicate Content Debate

One of the most argued story related to SEO is duplicate content. Some people believe that if two or more identical content are published on different URLs, Google will penalize them all regardless of which one is the original. The paranoia leads people to hunt down for plagiators in order to ask or force them to remove the duplicated story if necessary.

Some others do concern about duplicate content, but choose to battle plagiarism the other way. Instead of tracking scrapers, they concentrate on churning top notch content for their loyal readers. There are also a group of bloggers who make use of feed plugins to attach their copyright notice automatically on every feed. This method won’t stop scrapers from stealing content, but at least it will show web visitors the origin of the article.

I myself believe that Google is getting smarter in determining which page is the original publishing. Google uses a lot of metrics to determine a page’s rank and doesn’t depend solely on backlinks or similarity of a page one another.

In my participation in Busby SEO Test, I’m obligated to link to the original contest page. Since there are some of the contents I need to write based on the content on the contest page, I tailored my Busby SEO Test page differently from the contest page. I’m hoping that Google will see my page as a different page referencing to the contest page, not duplicating it.

Next, I’d love to hear what your opinion to this duplicate content issue. What do you do to protect your content? Or you’re not worried about it at all?

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