Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes

[BrianAlpert78]

Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes

There are a few layers to this question, but at the most basic level the question is...

-Will having the same article (in the form of archived e-newsletter issues) on multiple different websites' newsletter archives HURT those sites?

I'm fairly sure it won't HELP any of them in terms of SEO, but will having these back issues of their e-newsletters archived on their websites get them penalized? For the purpose of this question, these are not clients we are doing SEO for, just hosting and their e-newsletters. So it's fine if the archives provide no SEO benefit, we just don't want to leave them up if they will become LIABILITIES for the websites.

-If having the same article in archived issues of e-newsletters on multiple different websites WOULD be harmful, would moving these archives to a sub-domain change anything or would it be best to simply take the archives down altogether?

-Alternately, would spinning these articles make any difference in whether or not these sites get penalized?

-Lastly, would spinning make the articles usable for archived e-newsletters for clients that ARE signed on for SEO services?

I have a hunch about this, but I'd love to hear your expert opinions. Thanks!

[JordanLowry]

First off I would not recommend spinning any of the articles at all. That will appear deceptive and very spammy. However, I would look into repurposing existing content for your seo clients rather than spinning existing content. Look at adding something unique to a previous blog post or article instead.

Second as for the archived e-newsletter if it is on multiple sites you are going to run into a duplicate content issue. What you can do if your curious is add your hosting clients website as a moz campaign and crawl it. Then see how many instances of duplicate content you have.

Hope that helps some.

[GlobeRunner]

Jordan is right, I don't recommend spinning any of the content, it generally doesn't turn out well for users, and tends to make it 'unreadable'.

Your best bet here is to think of Search and Email as two separate things. If you're going to use the content in multiple newsletters and reach other audiences (the same person won't read it twice), then that's perfectly fine. However, if you're going to allow ANY of it to get indexed by the search engines, then I would only allow one copy to get indexed. You can archive the other copies, but just make sure that you don't allow indexing of those copies.

Duplicate Content isn't generally thought of as  'penalty', it's more about the fact that only the first crawled version gets indexed, and the others generally don't.