My question is what if a publisher has 100+ sites and they plan to produce a standard “about us”, “terms of use” and “privacy policy page” for all the 100+ sites. Is this a case of duplicate content or will the google algorithm be kind enough to turn a blind eye to it? Please answer, it’s very important when trying to create 100+ sites

In these times were social sites, twitter, facebook and stuff are taking over the net, it’s hard to tell what’s duplicate content. If someone bookmarks my post on digg, mixx, delicious and other how can i prevent that my ‘duplicate content’ is being distributed over the internet and harm my true content and web page?

If I am a part of one of those membership clubs where every member of the club (from 50 up to 150 members) gets the same sites and pages, then these sites are made up of syndicated content and not duplicate content, right? And Google treats them differently in the search results? Would Google filter out these pages and possibly site on which the pages reside?

If I change the keywords on the pages so that my pages are called up for different keywords (than the pages of the sites of the other members who leave the pages the way they got them) then that should work in giving me the uniqueness I need to get different traffic from different keywords? Most of the other members do not change anything on their pages. Would changing all the keywords work even though most of the content is the same as other members?

What if I only want to rank for the home page and I completely rewrite the home page and the first sentence of each paragraph in the other 19 pages of the site? Will I be able to rank for the home page since Google ranks pages and not sites? Or, will my whole site be sand boxed since there is so much syndicated PLR content on the other pages of my sites that are not rewritten (only the first sentence of each paragraph is)?

The new google farmer penalty does not affect my membership site home page and I can theoretically get #1 in Google because the home page is completely rewritten and the domain key word is unique compared to the other 50 to 150 membership sites? This ranking can happen even though most of the content on the other pages is not rewritten?

Hi Andrew, you could try submitting a DMCA infringement notice.
http://www.google.co.uk/dmca.html

But I would first try contacting the hosting company that host the offending site and requesting that they forcibly remove the content. (use WHOIS to find the host)
They will either remove it themselves of ask their customer to remove it.

There is a good template for a removal request letter on the link below:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/09/dmca-notice-of-copyright-infringement.html

Hope this helps.

Not sure you’ll notice this comment on a post so old, but here we go

Regarding the syndication of content, there is a syndication website that is publishing my content in full, which I don’t want obviously. There are no contact details or any way to request a removal. I’ve sent emails to generic email address’ like admin, administrator, postmaster etc. to try and have it removed with no luck.

The content is clearly mine, links back to my site etc. Is there anything I can do with Google to have these pages de-indexed or something along those lines?

Thanks for any advice in advance.

I have a question about the way Google deals with duplicate content that comes in from a totally different angle to the above. My question regards the Copyscape service. As you are no doubt aware, copyscape’s free search detects duplicate content in Googles index, which in turn allows webmasters to remove or otherwise correct the duplicate content issues. This also presumably has a very positive effect on Googles index itself, because as the duplicate pages are removed the index is in effect cleaned and results therefore improved. However, when a user needs to check a larger site with copyscape, Google API restrictions come into play which means that the user has to check against Yahoo’s index (sorry for the foul language hehe I cant help but think that Google is missing out on a trick here, and that in this instance the restrictions which are in place to preserve Google’s server resources are doing more harm than good, and resulting in Yahoo’s index being improved instead of your own. I would like to point out that I have nothing whatsoever to do with copyscape, but I am sure that if Google were to adopt a special API stance for plagiarism detection services such as this, it infact benefit Google and it’s users as much as it would the webmasters using copyscape. I would be interested to hear your take on this.

Kind Regards,
Nick D