For a well developed site, search engines drive 50-70 percent of the traffic. Clearly one way to get lots of search engine hits is to have lots of searchable content. Savvyaffiliate.com recommends that you write 1 page of content for your site per day. After not that long of a time you will have a large page. However you might also think, I can copy lots of articles, then the search engines will hit my site all the time. Lots of pages like Article City, or even the illustrious SavvyAffiliate.com offer Free Content, should I use it?

The answer to that is a resounding maybe.

If you are going to be using free content you have to understand what you are using it for and how search engines work. At a later date this site will get into a technical explanation of how search engines detect duplicate content, but for now a brief overview. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN have robots that crawl the web and index every page they find. The robots have a mathematical formula (like I said, more on that later) which cherry picks two or three sentences from your page and compares them to every other page ever indexed. If they are the same your page is considered a duplicate. When a person searches for a phrase, generally only one of the duplicate pages is shown. It annoys users to see lots of the same page over and over, so the duplicates are weeded out. How do they decide which are the copies and which is the original? That's a trade secret of the search engine companies, but many people guess the oldest usually gets considered the original, although this isn't always the case.

Bottom line - duplicate content won't usually show up in a a search.

Here's another question, If I have a few duplicate pages on my site, will the whole site be penalized or just those pages?

Generally just those pages will be penalized. However if more than approximately 1/3 of the content on your site is duplicate Google Yahoo and the others may consider your site to be junk and kick it lower in the rankings.

So duplicate content won't be indexed, might hurt me, why use it at all?

There are some good reasons to use duplicate content. If for instance you want to make sure your visitors have something new to see everyday when they come to your site, but only have time to write 4 or 5 pages a week, go ahead and fill in the gaps with the duplicate content. Those pages won't attract new visitors from the search engines, but it will keep your old users seeing new things and coming back. And that is a very good thing.

Anything else I can do?

Well some people try to throw up a page of just duplicate content. They figure it won't hurt their regular site, and any money they make is gravy since very little work is involved. You can try this if you wish. I myself have not tried it and imagine that it will work with varying degrees of success. Good luck.

That's it?

Nope, one final thing you can do is modify the content you get so it isn't duplicate any more. Of course this may violate the terms and conditions where you are getting the free content from, so you will have to check on that yourself. In general you have to change 10-20% of the content in order to ensure that it won't be considered a duplicate, although this is not guarantee, i.e. use at your own risk.

Does that work?

It might. The question is, if you are spending all the time modifying content why not write your own? SavvyAffiliate.com will be conducting an experiment shortly to see if they can automate the process of modifying content without changing the meaning. When the results are in we will keep you informed.

That's all folks?

One more thing - Legal Information - SavvyAffiliate.com in now way recommends that you violate any copy write what so ever. If you do not have permission to use content, do not post it on your site or use it in any way which violates the law. If you are unsure whether something is copywrited on the internet, then it is. If you don't know whether you should use it or not, then don't.