Will Google rank duplicate content? - Search Engines - SE Optimization

I have asked this question in several forums and at different membership sites. Every time I ask I have got an different answer, or at the best an very defuse answer.

I also see that a lot of other people ask the same question and are concern with the same issue.

So what is the correct answer to this, what is the truth about ranking of duplicate content?

I have discovered that the correct answer to this question, in short, is: Yes Google will index duplicate content, but there is a big BUT.

Here is an evidence to Yes Google will rank duplicate content

Take a search, in quotes, at the keyword phrase There Is No Such Thing As A Guaranteed Search Engine Ranking I found posted at ezinearticle.com

When you search the title of this article in quotes, you will find that Google give you 8 different result in return where several is complete the same article only hosted at different places.

If they didn't rank or indexed duplicate content you would only get one result in return from that search, or at least one result with the same title but with different body text.

Agree?

Since you find several listings with the same article, this tells you that Google, and all the other search engines for that matter, is indexing and ranking duplicated contents.

There you have it.

But keep on reading to find out about the BUT..

First

What is duplicated contents according to Google?

This is how they define it at: /2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

Why do Google rank duplicate contents?

According to Google they will index and rank at least one duplicate content if they find some, because they want to give the audience or the searcher some variants to choose from.

If you think about this for a while, it does make sense. Doesn't it?

You find the complete explanation at:

/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.html

What does this mean?

My first thought when I found this, was the danger and the possibility for anyone to create websites with other people contents and even rank well for it.

Is this really possible?

I don't have evidents that this isn't an doable option, but I strongly believe that this isn't the case.

And here comes my BUT from the beginning of this article.

What Google have stated, is that they can index an duplicate content and they can choose one or several they find.

This statement indicates that they will use the same ranking algorithm for duplicate content as they use when they index new original content.

The complete list of criteria Google use in their ranking algorithm is something only Google knows, and there is a lot of speculation on how Google evaluate websites when they index a website.

The person who find out the complete secret of how Google is ranking websites, will be a very rich person. He will easily dominate the web.

This is also the reason why Google is changing their algorithm all the time.

What we know about how Google ranks website today is, the fact, that ingoing links and the popularity (read traffic) to a website has an influence of how well a website is ranking in the search result.

The same is probably the case of witch duplicated content Google will choose to be indexed along with the original content for a specific search term.

This is how I believe Google is doing it today according to ranking duplicate content and how I interpret the information Google gives out about search engines ranking.

How they will do this in the future is something maybe not even Google knows today.

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