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You may have duplicate content without even knowing it, not because you stole it, or even because someone else stole yours, but because you have the same words on many of your own website pages. It can happen for a number of reasons...
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from qwerty 1082 Days ago #
Votes: 2

I think that if elements like navigation are enough to cause a group of pages to be viewed as duplicate content, the real issue is lack of content. You’d have to have some pretty empty pages for a search engine to have a problem with the fact that they all contain the words "Home," "About Us," and "Contact Us."

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from amabaie 1082 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Yeah, I think the question is what happens when you have a number of these elements all on the same page?  You might not want to change the navigation (or at least the basic navigation), but there might be other things you want to change.

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from Jill 1082 Days ago #
Votes: 2

From the article:"Duplicate content is one thing that will get you penalized for sure though. In fact, a duplicate content penalty could cause your site to drop out of the search results like a stone."This is simply not true and just adds to the SEO myths that abound. There’s no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.There is, in fact, duplicate content filters. For the type of duplicate content mentioned in the article, it’s rarely ever a problem. I’d sure love to see a real life example of headers and footers that got a site penalized as that just doesn’t ring true to me. Same with disclaimers and the like. Those things are not a problem whatsoever for search engines, and your site does not in any way get penalized for having them.

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from AlanBleiweiss 1082 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Jill, since Google sifts out some pages in a batch when they’re perceived to be too similar, that is absolutely a penalty as far as I’m concerned.  If my client has fifty pages and 30 of them aren’t indexed, how can that, from a client perspective, not be considered a penalty.  Is that a matter of parsing words? Sure.  Yet perspective of the client is as important as any other in our industry.  It really does come down to quality content making a difference in these situations, yet getting clients to allow us to get a lot of content on pages is almost always a losing battle.  They’d rather just walk away in a huff moaning about the "dumb Google rules".

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from Jill 1081 Days ago #
Votes: 1

AlanBleiweiss said:If my client has fifty pages and 30 of them aren’t indexed, how can that, from a client perspective, not be considered a penalty.  They do get indexed though. The type of duplicate content talked about in the article doesn’t stop those pages from being indexed.

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from Jill 1080 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Extremely concerned with the SEO community that enabled this erroneous article to go hot.

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from seoz87 1079 Days ago #
Votes: 0

No such thing as duplciate content exist. I have a proof. Even Google assign PR to duplciate content site. And this website has no trust at all. no backlinks. :) no visitors. But has PR :P

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from KDye 1078 Days ago #
Votes: 0

It’s the penalty word which is a problem :-) There is certainly a "similar content" filter, and Patricia even says it herself in the comments "if you have less unique content on your pages than those template words, you will pay a price" it is the uniqueness of the rest of the page that is important.

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from Jill 1044 Days ago #
Votes: 0

This article is mostly wrong as it starts with the wrong premise, that there is a duplicate content penalty.

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from phaithful 1044 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Agreeing with Jill. In addition, there are many IR papers that discuss filtering out "boilerplate" content such as navigation and footers from the Recall portion.

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from StephenCronin 1044 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I’m with Jill. Also, I’m sure Google can tell what’s content and what’s navigation / sidebars etc

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