I've never been a hard-core fan of various duplication movements that favor the presence of duplication being treated as a tolerable measure of leveraging our tech-driven resources. For example, whenever I produce a demo using public information, I always work hard to find ways of trimming and slimming any appearance of improperly applied duplication of the data without distracting from the overall visual objective which may call for duplication to occur.
Recently, I came across a discussion thread surrounding what turned out to be an issue surrounding the presence of identical content showing up in the major search engine indexes. The individual was asking for observations regarding the new site and one of the posters immediately offered up a perspective towards the downside of hosting duplicate content which the site clearly contained.
There hasn't been and probably won't be any clear and entirely conclusive method to say yea or nay on whether or not any licensing issues are at play with any piece of duplicated materials and it turned out the site owner did purchase the content from a 3rd party service provider. So although the discussion became hot and heavy for a while centering around common terms such as theft representing the reason why duplicate content is present in other sites, even I still harbor conflicting contradictions on Fair Use policies and how they are being implemented, let alone the impact of selling licensing rights to content that can quickly be construed as laziness, an attempt to spam the indexes, etc. if someone is interested in analysing a site from such a position. Once the site owner clarified the content came from a 3rd party service provider, the discussion toned down significant, but such confusion still can leave raw marks on someone's ego.
Therefore, if you are purchasing content from a 3rd party for online use, be sure to do your homework and try to find out how many others currently have the same content posted on their websites. Sometimes you can work your way through the search engine indexes for such a discovery, but unless you have one of these leads, you may very well have to outright ask the company.
The purpose for this type of research matters when it comes to a site owner wanting to gamble on garnering organic traffic from end-users accessing these indexes. If the site owner doesn't care about their presence in the search engines because they are satisfied with the traffic they are generating, purchasing the licensing rights to content is not a terrible market position to take. Ghost writing comes to mind and its role throughout history.
However, if the site owner is out to actively attain and sustain a Top whatever ranking, they risk auto-scoring mechanisms tilting their address towards the debit side of life. Basically, if you don't first bring the traffic, you're not going to out-score another site with the same content actively soliciting traffic through a variety of means and methods unless you bring additional strategies into your mix that also can quickly tip into the deficit column, such as keyword stuffing and link farms...no matter what major commercial search index you access. This type of popularity contest does not always find its way into other databases designed to be searched by an end-user, such as a library or a catalog, but it holds special significant for the searchable indexes such as the top 3 in the stock market.
Time to get back to hand-crafting more content.
