It seems I was wrong and the marketing monkeys at Flakelet.com did reply – and with an explanation on how duplicate content works and that I have nothing to worry about! I can go on my merry way copying their articles and pasting them on my site, and Google won’t care a jot – at least according to Ms. Weng Lopez. Here is what she said:

Hi Darren,

Thanks for replying. For details, you can browse the database of our articles at www.flakelet.com, where you can also learn more about how we work.

For concerns about duplicate content here are two reasons:

1. Duplicate content is an issue only when present on your own site (and that kind of duplicate content could cause some serious trouble for you). But, Google won’t punish you for reprinting other peoples’ content and they routinely index duplicate content pages, without a problem. You can easily check this by Googling a random article title from an article directory, such as EzineArticles.com. More often than not, you will find that multiple copies of the same article exist in Google’s index.

Why yes, if you search for a specific article title then you will find the sites where that article has been used. Naturally – if Google didn’t show you the sites where it had been used, it wouldn’t be of much use as a search engine. However, if I searched for phrases relating to that article I would NOT find each of those pages, all being duplicates of each other.

Google won’t punish you for copying content? I happen to think that’s about as inaccurate as you can get. Good luck with that Ms. Weng Lopez.

She continued:

2. We don’t require you to republish our articles “as is.” In fact, you can change them as much (or as little) as you wish and you will own the copyright. In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description. By adding a short 1-2 sentence introduction at the beginning, you should be more than covered.

“In our experience, it’s enough for Google to consider a page unique, if it has a unique title and a meta description.” …erm… no. A world of no, and once again, just in case I’ve not made myself perfectly clear, no.

Btw, we will be covering the issue of duplicate content in detail in our community, which is another good reason for joining. If you are interested, just follow this link http://flakelet.com/wp-register.php and register with the following invitation code: w4507l .

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me again.

Best regards,

Ms. Weng Lopez
weng.lopez@mikino.com
www.flakelet.com

Now I have to admit, I am curious as to what they’re going to say about duplicate content – merely because I need a good laugh and don’t often get chuckles on an SEO front – since I stopped visiting the forums at SEOchat at least.

However, I think I’ll leave this be for now… although I can feel the urge to reply coming on.

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