What is Duplicate Content Part II

What does this mean to you? You should not deliberately create multiple versions of the same content, changing only the keywords. This will be detected, and unless the text is also relevant to the keywords used, the search engine will list only one of your pages, or perhaps even none of them. If you are involved in affiliate marketing, you should also be careful of copying content provided by the merchant directly to a web page. You can be almost certain that many others have done the same.

Be careful of scraped content, such as scraped article packs that are sold online. This content has been scraped from blogs and article directories, and the same content can be used on hundreds of other web pages. Any page with scraped content is liable to be filtered by duplicate content filters.

Article marketing is popular, but people tend to submit the same articles to a number of different directories. What this means is that each directory will have the same content in its database of articles. Initially the same article has a chance of being listed several times in an index, but over time, these will be filtered until there is only one. The major benefit of submitted articles, therefore, is through their access by visitors to these directories and who use the search boxes to seek articles using specific keywords, rather than through their search engine listings.

In some cases, the search engine might not be able to determine the source of the original article and filter out the writer's web page. This is why you should never use a submitted article on your own website, unless it is a rewritten version.

Google refers to 'substantive blocks of content', but does not qualify what is meant by that. It might be possible to overcome the duplicate filter by rewriting parts of a web page or article, but if you don't known by how much you must do it, it is probably as well just rewriting the whole thing.