Duplicate content penalties have become a real big talking point in the Internet marketing community in recent months. Some say that duplicate content hurts your rankings badly in the search engines, while others say it dosen’t. Search engine companies do not reveal all their secrets, so it is only by experimentation by some hardcore search engine optimization specialists that we are able to at least find some answers, no matter how inconclusive they are.

There are many theories on the duplicate content penalty and whether it exists. One theory is that search engines will look at which website first published the article or content. The website which published it first will be attributed with the content and hence not punished if another site publishes the same content.

Another theory is that search engines use the site’s reputation to judge whether it is using duplicate content. In this case, the site with the lower reputation will get punished. The site with the higher reputation will receive the search engine’s attention.

Yet another hypothesis suggests that no penalty exists at all. Many websites for many search terms contain the same content, and most of them exist on the same page, or just a few pages apart. Many news sites, some argue, contain virtually similar content, yet are not ‘punished’ by the search engines.

The bottomline: it is probably better to play safe. Search engines are designed to give users a better search experience, so try to use unique and useful content wherever possible!

Fabian Tan is an established Internet entrepreneur who has built many online businesses. Find out how he used a popular Search Engine Optimization tool called SEO Elite to boost his search engine rankings almost overnight at his SEO Elite review site.