Anyone involved in SEO is well-aware of the emphasis search engines put on original content. But by looking at the bigger picture of online marketing, one can clearly see that original content isn’t always the be-all-end-all of online marketing and blatantly duplicate content can actually make a lot of sense as part of a longer term strategy.
One of Sweden’s largest blog networks, Feber (english: fever) earlier this year launched a new blog at  film.feber.se which is all about movies, with daily well-written posts.  So far so good. The issue from an SEO perspective is that all of its content is sourced word-by-word from moviezine.se. Although Feber is indexed by Google it rarely shows up for any movie related searches as it’s being outranked by MovieZine which has a stronger domain.
Feber is very transparent about where its articles are sourced from, clearly highlighting the source below each article with an outbound link and also have a big logo in the site header stating the partnership with MovieZine. So as there’s clearly no sneaky tactics going on here, what is the plan then?
I suspect that Feber is well aware of its SEO duplicate content issues and that this is a conscious trade-off for their long-term strategy to build a brand and readership base. In this case the strategy is likely to first organically gain readers from other parts of their blog network and word-of-mouth and thus growing the overall readership for both Feber and MovieZine. And looking at the number of user comments for each article that Feber is posting they are getting there quite rapidly.
As the next step in the SEM strategy I would suggest to pad out the site with additional unique content in order to start ranking naturally for their own content which will bring in even more additional readers for both Feber and MovieZine. Additionally they could also make use of Google’s upcoming support for cross-domain canonical tag 2.0.
Update: I got a response from Roger Ã…berg who’s one of the founders of Feber who confirms my analysis (freely translated from Swedish):
We almost always look at SEO last thing.. Instead we focus on content and our readers. We know that the articles are of interest to our visitors and we believe we have many readers that don’t visit MovieZine and vice versa. Through this partnership we get better material compared to if we would produce all articles ourselves = everybody wins.
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I am the other founder of Feber.se and I guess from your perspective it sounds kind of odd not being interested in SEO but our advertisers are not interested in “hit-and-runs-traffic” from Google and if their not interested, neither are we.
We just wanna deliver great content to great readers!
Thanks for your input Wille. I definitely understand your “content and users” first approach, it makes perfect sense.
I do think however that long-term you have everything to win by considering SEO as not a “hit-and-run” channel, but a sustainable channel for new audience to find your content in the first place. And if they like what you read, they will keep coming back through bookmarks and feed readers just like the rest of your readers.
SEO isn’t about gaming the search engines (that’s just not sustainable as you point out), but making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. So far no search engine is near perfect or smart enough to manage that on their own, so they need some help from SEOs to structure and emphasise content in a way that makes it easier for them to provide quality results and overall user experience.
I agree with Willie/Feber.
When content and users are put at the top of the priority list, SEO (and many other pieces) tend to fall into place. The goal of the search engines is to provide users with the most relevant content available; the search engines are trying to act like human users. If we make users happy, we will in turn make SEs happy, especially as search evolves in accordance with users’ changing search habits.
There are a number of reasons why pages don’t show up in search engine results.
One area where this is particularly true is when the content at more than one web address, or URL, appears to be substantially similar at each of the locations it is seen by the search engines.
Some duplication of content may mean that pages are filtered at the time of serving of results by search engines, and there is no guarantee as to which version of a page will show in results and which versions won’t. Duplication of content may also mean that some sites and some pages aren’t indexed by search engines at all, or that a search engine crawling program will stop indexing all of the pages of a site because it finds too many copies of the same pages under different URLs.
Interestingly enough, we are looking at this exact issue, as we are looking to launch a blog network of related niches, that will inevitably, have some overlap & we are keen to utislise contributor content across the whole.
Another evolution that has been suggested is placing all the content into a single platform “Master” & make all of the other platforms “Servants” ; i.e. the servants would pick up & link organically back to the original posted.
Have spent more time than is healthy trawling through Google Webmaster & some other SEO forums, only to receive wildly conflicting answers, you guys get the casting vote.
Paul, I suggest looking at the canonical 2.0 tag to tell google where you want the juice to flow and what page to rank.