Will Google ban your site for duplicate content?

This is very good question, and I think I can answer this, simply because I have experience working with sites using duplicate content, sites with unique content, and sites with a mixture of the two. I have about a dozen web sites now, and one of them I worked on a few years ago is completely banned from Google despite all the high quality backlinks I have developed for that site. Why was it banned? Well 99% of the content was duplicated from other sites, specifically from articlecity.com and ezinearticles.com. Google then looked at that site and seen that all the content was taken from just two sites, and as smart as Google is, they put a ban on it, not one page is indexed in their search engine. But other search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN have all the pages indexed from that site. Considering that it is my site, and it still took a lot of work to make all the pages and get all the content from those "article" sites, I honestly believe Google did the right thing. And you shouldn't just make sites for Yahoo and MSN's search engines, as most of the search engine traffic comes from Google.

Duplicate content works if done right. I have a few sites, solely made from duplicate content, and they have been well indexed and high ranked on Alexa for awhile now. The key to make duplicate content work without penalties is where you obtain the content from.

From my experience, I think google has "flagged" specific sites, where as if people take content from that site and put it on their site, it will have a negative impact on your site and you will be closer to the "ban" status. Which sites do I think are "flagged"? Sites like ezinearticles.com articlecity.com, and goarticles.com and the like are most likely monitored to see if other sites take their content and put it on their site. So be warned if you take any articles from their sites and put it on yours, it will have a negative impact on your site, and the more percentage of content taken from those sites, the more your site will be frowned upon by Google.

Knowing this, you should only have about 3% or less of your total content from "article" housing sites, such as those mentioned above. The rest should be taken from less well known sites, that have not been well established for a long time. So where do you get duplicate content from? Well this is a good question, and I can say it is not easy. It does take time to construct a site from duplicate content, you need to take content from not just one site, but a multitude sites. Also you should generally make sure the content is legal to take, that it has not been copyrighted. I like to browse forum topics and take content from forum posts, or news group discussions, as I think those are very good places to look for content. You can join chat rooms, and copy lectures taken from people during them and use them. But the key here is to make sure the content you take is not all from just one site, or even just a few sites, it must be very sporadic and not obvious to Google that the content from your site is just duplicated from another site(s).

Another alternative to obtaining duplicate content, even from sites such as ezinearticles.com articlecity.com, and goarticles.com (the article housing sites as I like to call it) is to take those articles from those sites and then use a "spinner" program to scramble the text around to still make it readable but make it more unique. There are many of these programs available, but the one I like best is XXX. These programs still take some time to get it to scramble the text correctly, but you should have no problem with XXX. Good luck and I hope this article helps.