How to optimize licensed content in websites?

Question

Hi Guys,

I have seen some of these big websites using licensed content on their sites. However when you check for these sites for plagiarism the same contents can be found and licensed by other websites.

Does Google apply any penalty to these sites? The reason I am asking these because I saw some of the pages of these websites where they have used the licensed content rank in top 10 in organic results for some keywords.

Or is there any way you know why these websites are ranked well for keywords (for which the content is licensed)

Thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

Duplicate content will not help you for you SEO needs. I would recommend having a copywriter put together some fresh copy for your site implementing keywords for your industry.

http://www.searchengineoptimizationjourn...

Answer 2

Google does not know which one of the duplicate content was the first, and which web sites copied.

Answer 3

Duplicate content is something that we as SEO people feel is frowned upon by the search engines especially google

I think probably the duplicate page has lots of anchor text backlinks pointing to it hence the high ranking

Answer 4

A good reference is Google's own article about duplicate content:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters...

They recognize legitimate uses of duplicate content, and syndicated content is one of them. In your case, it may be that the sites have additional content that helps them rank well; that they have a good linking structure (internal, as well as inbound links from other sites), and/or they are ranking well for long-tail keyphrases with less competition.

They *may* also gain boosts from keywords in the domain name, keywords in the url, page structure/html, etc. However, these areas, which used to be more relevant to ranking well, are increasingly considered to have little or no effect on ranking.

Finally, contrary to another answer to this question - Google's algorithms to attempt to determine the original owner of the content, and which sites have mere copies. It's assumed this is based heavily on the age of the page, but I imagine other factors probably play a role as well.