Can un-unique content damage my rankings?

[craven22]

Hi there,

I run a blog @ http://ablemagazine.co.uk

We produce our own editorial content for our print magazine. Which means I have a great bank of uniquely written content. I can usually afford to post 1-2 completely 100% unique articles a day. I've also been copy/pasting 2-3 articles from the BBC or The Guardian a day to keep up activity.

Should I continue doing what I'm doing?

Should I post exclusively unique articles?

Thanks

[flowsimple]

Yes, a direct copy of another website's content will have an adverse affect on your rankings.

If you find something interesting about an article on another website, perhaps you can make a post that only quotes a part of it and links to the original if your readers want to read the whole article. And also add your own commentary as to why you found the article worth sharing with your readers.

[KeriMorgret]

In addition to ranking problems, direct copying of copyrighted articles can open you up to legal repercussions. I second what Pashmina says -- quote only a small portion of the article, and add in commentary about why you feel this is important and why your readers should go view the entire article.

[craven22]

I already only copyright 200 words (which is protected under fair use)

[craven22]

If my front page of a blog is 100% unique but subsequent pages have copy/pasted stories - will that affect my ranking for my main page or just those subsequent pages?

[KeriMorgret]

You want to avoid copying and pasting stories, period. Last week, there was a thread in Google Webmaster Central Help about someone having his rankings and traffic disappear because of copied content. A summary of that thread is available at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-copycat-13172.html.

Relevant to your situation is this quote from a Google employee:

One thing that is very important to our algorithms is unique and compelling content. In general, it makes little sense for us to crawl and index content that is copied, rewritten, automatically translated or otherwise automatically processed -- we assume that our users would much rather want to find the original source. With that in mind, I would strongly recommend removing all such content -- should you have any -- and making sure that all of your content is of the highest quality possible, and really unique and compelling, in short: something that users will want to refer friends to.

[craven22]

So is the answer 'No one really knows'

Not copy/pasting stories is not always the solution. There is a ratio. As an experiment on my other site (which I didn't use) I set up a plugin on wordpress to automatically post from a RSS feed. Since installing that plugin about 2 months ago my traffic has went from 200 uniques a month to around 1200 uniques a month. (Not a massive amount of traffic but a increase none-the-less)

I'm just wondering what the ratio of unique/copy is acceptable?

[KeriMorgret]

It's probably an "it depends" answer for the ratio, and that's if we actually had access to the algorithm. In the case above, the guy was (and still is) removed from the index.

Someone else may come in with studies they have done to give you more of an answer based on their experience in their niche, but there's not going to be one magic number that serves as a cutoff for every site.