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For the last year I have been running a blog called Lean Startups Blog. I want to take it to another level by inviting guest posters and possibly inviting some of my friends to co-run it with me. I will start distancing my personal brand from it shortly. I am starting another blog, which will be my brand - The Operations Guy.

Question: I want to syndicate some of the blog posts from my Lean Startups Blog. Will search engines penalize me, since this is technically duplicate content under different url? If it is bad for SEO, what are the best practices to pull in other blog posts into your blog?

Thanks for your help!

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3 Answers

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For most cases, Google does not punish duplicate content; they just sort it out themselves.

From the official google webmaster blog:

  • Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show if your sites includes duplication. If you don't want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.

  • Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers.

  • Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be placed in the supplemental index. Duplication may indirectly influence this however, if links to your pages are split among the various versions, causing lower per-page PageRank.

(an older discussion on this topic from the same source can be found here )

Takeaway: If you're not doing spammy / black hat type stuff, you should be ok.

Here's another article with additional info.

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I'm no SEO expert, so this is all just some common sense advice, and something that I would do if in your shoes. Essentially this is a combination of different advice I've heard on the 'net filtered through what I would consider to be reasonable (and a good thing for society).

If you're afraid of duplicating content here are some ideas that I have that you could do, for instance:

  • Combine several articles from the old blog into one article on the new blog. Thus you would have a new meta "best of" / "top five" type of blog article.
  • Produce an updated version of the old blog article with feedback from commenters, new points that you've read or seen elsewhere, and other new content.
  • In a similar vein to the last point, post the entire old article, but append to the main article the best comments and provide a response or comment on each.

The key idea would be to provide additional original content that enhanced the old blog articles. Also you should add links from the old articles to the new and updated ones, either automatically with the trackback links or by putting a notice at the top/bottom of the article.

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agreed - always better to add an update paragraph or example links to make the duplicate fresh - and different! – jimg Feb 25 '10 at 13:23
up vote 1 down vote

I have some syndicating sites and they have a lot of visitors from Google. It is probably not ranked as if the content was original but still they are popular in the niche.

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