Thats great information Mary.

I have put 1 or 2 of my articles on active rain but i have been concerned about doing it too much and getting penalized by the dupe content filter.

From what you are saying the chances of that happening are so slim i will have better luck at the craps table.

:-)



Thanks

Time to start putting my stuff on AR

Loren

Good post, Mary. Nice to see this kind of information being shared with R.E. agents.



Couple points if I may:



1) Duplicate content filters don't only hit spammers and mirror sites. An agent who puts the same article/post on her own blog and on Active Rain runs the risk of having one of those pages filtered. But as you said, it's no big deal if one page goes into supplemental index. Plus, there may be more overall benefits to getting the AR exposure even if it means the post on your own blog gets dinged as dupe content.



Example: I share some of the blog posts I write with Search Engine Guide (SEG). I do some slight rewriting of the post and wait about 6-8 weeks before giving it to the other site. This way, if the version on my site becomes popular (via links, comments, traffic, etc.), it has a chance to gain some trust/authority. I know the version that SEG posts will have trust/authority, so I hope that my own version can at least compete, and possibly win if there's a dupe content issue. But even if the SEG version wins and gets better search engine visibility, that's okay because I still get exposure from it -- it brings lots of traffic to my blog. So the dupe content risk is well worth it to me. The same might very well apply with individual RE blogs and AR.



2) SEs do block-level content analysis, so even if the AR version has more comments than your own version, the text that is duplicated can still be identified as such.



In the same way, the fact that your own blog has different widgets, links, and other sidebar/header/footer content doesn't really matter. The engines ignore that content for the sake of measuring dupe content, and good thing -- if they didn't ignore it, every blog post you write could be a dupe of the last one. :-)



The "meat" of a page or post is what matters where dupe content is concerned.



3) I think you have a typo in your closing comments: Rand's quote says "hundreds or thousands", but you quoted it as "hundreds OF thousands."



Thanks!

I previously had a website hosted by Advanced Access.  A large number of my pages were sent to supplemental results (aka Google Hell.)  Advanced Access offered no explanation.  Rankling fell from page one for many important keywords, to total obscurity. 

The site did not have duplicated pages.  However, I am wondering if the spiders detected some duplicated keywords or terms?  Obviously, a site about Minneapolis real estate will have many pages with the words like "home, house for sale, real estate, real estate agent etc.  popping up over and over again.

What do you think?  Do you have any resources that discuss the "supplemental results" conundrum?

Whew - That is a relief ... although I must say that I DO try to "mix it up a bit" between my BLOG and my AR blog.

Great article, as always, mary. I am very careful to not copy content across my various blogs...guess it's my paranoia. Glad to know I was behaving and don't have to worry.

Miss you on AR but pop by to read now and then.

Cheers,

Jeff

Hi Mary,

Thanks for this clarification!  I have always heard to avoid duplicate content, but this post makes it clearer the why's and why not's about dupe content.  And I feel a bit better about using some AR posts on my nice new blog that you've got me going on...  ;-)

Thanks again!

Ann

Matt,

Thanks for the comment and your thoughts.  However, I would never misquote SEOmoz, the quote in my article is as it is on Rand's original SEOmoz piece.  Perhaps he meant to say "hundreds of thousands" but it reads "hundreds or thousands."

Property Hogs,

The read more tag is only valuable in that it drives more traffic back to your primary site.  The duplication of content across AR and your personal blog is not a  likely scenario for getting dropped from Google's index as  fully explained on the referenced sources int his post.

Thanks... this is good stuff.  I'm glad someone is out there being helpful

Thanks for that info - I had asked that same question on AR and Ines told me you had a great explanation - thanks. Hearing nothing but great things about your services. :-)  Look forward to learning more.

Mary, thanks for the clarification!  I've been searching for an answer on this topic.  I should have thought to look here first!

Russell,

Thanks for dropping by and I agre no-follow tags would work, or you can always use the dreaded, no-cache/no-index tags.  Although, i don't much think that Google cares about the small time offenders- they are after the real crooks.

Hi Mary,

My name is Dave Creaturo and I’m from Charleston SC. I’ve been reading your blogs for the last few months and have found your blog the most useful and user friendly that I’ve come across.

Here’s my Problem I started blogging a few months ago and found my website(page 30 in google)  www.Charlestonsouthernhomes.com reach #1 down to  #5 up to #2 down to #4 and so on. I then started copying my blog onto my AR blog and have seen my site drop to #12-15.    Keyword: Charleston SC real estate

What Happened???  Is it the Active Rain ghost?