A common myth perpetuated in the SEO world is that you need to be careful with duplicate content to avoid penalties from search engines. The fact is that the Internet is full of duplicate content. Press releases, syndicated news stories, newsgroup and mailing list archives, and open source content all produce massive amounts of duplicated content. For example, take a popular Wikipedia entry and drop an excerpt into a search engine. You will see that many people use this content and often these pages rank higher than the original Wikipedia entry.

Consider that it would be a massive computing effort for any search engine to identify all pages on the Internet that are even 90% alike.  When you consider each web site has unique headers, footers, sidebars, and comments, chances are your site would be more like 50% similar to any other site even if you copied most of the articles from that site. Furthermore, if your autoblog pulls from many sources your site really is not a duplicate of any single site anymore. You can rest assured that there is no automatic detection that your site contains partial duplicate content from multiple sources.

However, we have seen many autoblogs that would never pass a manual inspection. If your site looks like spam then chances are that it will be penalized or even banned from the search engines. The problem is that if you aren’t courteous to other webmasters, it is really easy for them to report your site as spam, triggering a manual review by the search engines. If your web site looks like it does nothing more than steal content from others, chances are they will penalize you for being nothing other than duplicate content.

Here are some tips to help avoid any search engine penalties:

Add Value – Keep in mind, that there are many big web sites that are nothing but duplicated content.  Technorati, Google News, and many other sites are nothing but fancy autoblogs. If your site does nothing but repeat the content of a couple other blogs, you can expect to fail a manual review. We really don’t need more sites like that on the Internet. Create your autoblog with a purpose and give the user real value. A professional design and a personal touch can also make a big difference when it comes to manual reviews.

Be Courteous – The most important thing is to not anger other webmasters because they are they ones most likely to report you to the search engines. We find that it is best to not take every single article from another site without asking them permission. It is better to use the search-based feeds to pull your articles from a variety of different sites rather than directly pulling the feed from one or two specific blogs. You would be surprised to find that many bloggers are willing to let you pull excerpts from their feeds, especially if your site looks professional and has good page rank.

Still, you may find that some authors will complain even if you pull just one excerpt from their site. Although with just an excerpt you are probably safe from a legal perspective, but it is always best to show courtesy by apologizing and placing their site on the URL Blacklist in AutoBlogged so their articles don’t appear.

Make sure your web site has a way to contact you so that other webmasters will come to you first rather than just reporting you as spam to the search engines.

Fair Usage - When pulling articles from another site, be sure to keep your excerpts short and respect the copyrights of others. Some feeds include copyright notices and you can even include those in your post template. Always give credit to your sources and link to the original article. We also like to include a footer and about page that explains that the site is an autoblog and that the content was written by others. It is best to not take full articles, attempt to rewrite or spin articles, or use other blackhat methods that make it look like you are hiding something.

The User Experience - Although their are many algorithms that search engines use to rank content, it ultimately comes down to user experience. The whole point of having penalties is to prevent spammers from manipulating the system. If you build your site with real users in mind, and provide real value, chances are you won’t ever face any search engine penalties.