How much constitutes duplicate content in your opinion?

[Martin_S]

Mornin'

In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks?

Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy!

All hail originality.

[Marcus_Miller]

This post covers all the different types of duplicate content in some detail:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

I have never read anything else that is as informative and clearly explained as that post.

Read it and be enlightened!

Cheers
Marcus

[borderbound]

I always use copyscape for everything I write even though my articles are original just in case a term or phrase has been said before, - nothings original anymore.

its very cheap - I've been using them all year and haven't run out of my $10 credit.

They scan the web for duplicate content - if they find it, google will too.

[Martin_S]

Thanks,

That's the tool I've been using and it is very handy. I can now show the company that I know exactly what's going on.

After reading this SEOmoz post though - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages - I am considering removing the old news articles from 4/5/6 years ago. They have no page authority, and they receive no traffic. My developer thinks it's a bad idea.

Any thoughts on doing so?