Originally Posted by amabaie

I just can't resist jumping in here, because this is not only an interesting thread, but one we might still be debating years from now. First, I find this statement incredible:



Although I have to assume it is accurate, would not every article directory be banned to Kingdom Come?

We have to ask what we mean by "duplicate content"? Or more to the point, duplicate in what context. In the context of indexing the page, clearly Google could care less. Duplication plays no roill in whether to index or not. In terms of showing the results in the SERPs, well, that depends. When putting the article title or some line that appears in every instance in quotation marks, for that very specific search, Google will show many results. So will Yahoo. But for a shorter-tale, more competitive search phrase, will Google show multiple instances? I am pretty sure I have seen this, but I also am quite certain that Google looks for ways to curtail such happenings.

Or are we discussing the context of link juice. Just because Google shows a page as indexed and even turns it up in very specific searches, does not mean the page passes along any link juice. A couple weeks ago I blogged about how (see Yahoo was violating the nofollow convention ) because it was reporting backlinks from blog comments that had nofollow attributes. A couple days later I was checking another website's Google backlinks and wouldn't you know it, I found a number of nofollow links reported. This means either the search engines are indexing the links but not counting them as link juice (they might still use them for relevancy purposes) or they have quietly stopped respecting the nofollow attribute they created. Where am I going with this? Articles might be consider duplicate content for some purposes and not for others, so be very careful what conclusions you jump to.