Does the Duplicate Content Penalty Affect Copy and Paste Systems?
One of the biggest worries that people have about copy and paste systems is the fact that there has been a lot of discussion about the 'duplicate content penalty' and how it could adversely affect copy and paste systems. Some people even go so far as to recommend not bothering about any form of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) whatsoever simply due to the fact that it isn't going to matter anyway as a result of this penalty.
Frankly speaking, there is no truth to this whatsoever.
Granted, duplicate content is not the 'nicest' thing in the world, but the truth is that there is no such thing as the duplicate content penalty - at least not in the terms that most people believe it to be. In fact, Google has announced multiple times that it does not penalize duplicate content and so you really have nothing to fear!
If you think about it for a minute, you'll realize that having a duplicate content penalty is really not possible. After all, who is to say which website 'originally' contained a certain piece of content? Sure, it might be the website that was first indexed, but that content may have been copied from a 'dead' website with zero traffic that hadn't been indexed yet. Does it make sense to penalize the 'original' owner of the content simply because their website wasn't indexed fast enough?
Of course not! And that is why duplicate content really is not penalized. Sure, it may not be given as much credit as wholly original content is, but at the end of the day it certainly isn't going to drag your rankings down even the slightest bit. And it also is not a good reason to ignore SEO efforts!
Unless you happen to have a surefire way of generating traffic in the long term, ignoring SEO is really one of the biggest mistakes that you could ever make, even as part of a copy and paste system. All things said and done, organic traffic from search engines is the single largest source of traffic on the internet - and if you're not tapping into it then you're going to be missing out!
Don't believe everything that you hear. Duplicate content is pretty much the equivalent of an 'urban myth' on the internet, and while it might be a good idea to throw in some original content here and there, having duplicate content is not going to limit your efforts to gain search engine traffic. In some cases, it might even do the opposite!
So, to answer the original question: No, the duplicate content penalty does not affect copy and paste systems because it does not exist!
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