Duplicate Content

How harmfull is duplicated content throughout a website?
There are some cases to drive a point home this may be necessary, good for getting the point to the customer, but how bad is it for SEO?

[temi]

Its extremely harmful for SEO. You should make each content as unique as possible, if you need to repeat a point, you should reference the locations where that point is rather than copy it again

Is it harmful in respect of Google considering it as spam?

[OldWelshGuy]

You are going to have to define duplicate content better. Are you talking about duplicate pages or elements on a page that are duplicated? If you are talking about elements then it is not bad, in fact you would EXPECT to find duplicate elements sitewide like navigation etc.

OTOH, if you are talking about substancially duplicate text on the page with only a location change etc, then that IS bad and will mess you up a little.

Can you better define what you mean by duplicate? ie % of content and what elements they are. etc

It was just a generall question really OWG.

What started it was i set a new section on my Forum for Articles (go on take a look you know you want to!!!..LOL)
I copied a couple of existing articles over from the "resource" section of the site and realised that this would be classed as duplicate content, so i needed to remove one or the other.

I understood that dupliacte content could couse SEO problems and was just looking for a little more info on the subject.For example what the effects actually could be.

I also thought it good for anyone who may not realise this was a possible problem for them to read about it.

[maldives]

Originally Posted by midlandi

was just looking for a little more info on the subject.For example what the effects actually could be.

Duplicate content penalty is the last thing you might want if you are a hard owrking webmaster. Google simply freezes your website in SERPs. No more visitors from big G.

[OldWelshGuy]

There is no real penalty for dup content, it is just a series of events that can harm your rankings. Here is the cold hard facts on dup content as told by Vanessa Fox.

1) Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.

2) Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

If anyone has any questions on this then ask away