Duplicate Content question

Is it the individual page that I need to worry about or is it the site as a whole?

Reason I ask, is part of my site, which is mostly forums, also contains How-To articles written by individual users. Some of these articles are shown by several sites as the authors are members of multiple sites.

So if I have a page with an article substantially similar to a page on another site, but have several thousand totally unique pages (my forums) is there the possibility of a penalty? (maybe 15 pages total are "duplicate)

If so - what % of that page should I change and how should I cahange it to get past any penalty? Is minor rewording enough?

 

I have only seen the duplicate content filters triggered by EXACT 100% copies. So including navigation, footers, titles etc. If the article is on your own website with its unique style/lay-out then you should be just fine.

Think about it, if it would cause you trouble then none of the news sites could publish Reuters articles.

 

I have a similar problem with one of my sites:
I was using content (only text) from other site and they sent me an advice because I was stealing content and so on...

Searching on the web, I found a software that synonymizes content (if you want to check it, it´s "synonymizer"). It looks good but I would like to know what do you think about this...

 

I don't know about that software but what you are saying is a whole different debate.

If you are copying content without their consent, then you should limit your snippet to 5-10% of the original. This is the accepted size you are allowed to 'borrow' as long as you still credit the source.

From Google's perspective: anything over probably around 98% similarity will be flagged.
From copyright point of view: anything over 10% straight copy is illegal.

 

That's what I think too. You can only be penalised by G if you are close to identical.

 

Google will penalize copied and duplicate content. I have a program that I can check on the web and specific websites for copied material. It is a useful tool and helps me track down the competitors that are willing to take short cuts.

It is easy to get rid of anyone who copies your content. Report them to their hosting company and since the hosting companies dont want to get in trouble themselves they tell the person to remove it or be removed from their host.

 

Google does penalize duplicate content but 2 pages must be really really close.

Many website have an almost exact copy of their home pages linked each other to target each city of the US and google does not seem to do anything about it.

 

for duplicate content or free article, the challenge is to get rank well in search engines sinve you're not suposed to alter the content.

 

I think Duplicate content is taken very seriously by GG, I have seen SERPs dropping due to duplicate content..

But the worst part is sometimes, thiefs get away and people whose content get stolen, gets dropped..

 

I added "Printer Friendly" pages some time ago which may be as close as 90% and saw no penalty. This is a common practice to make sites more "user friendly" so it would be counter productive for Google to penalize such pages.