Duplicative Content Fairness?
Definition: Duplicative Content = Content that is between 1-99.9% duplicate of another article already in our system.
Definition: Duplicate Content = Content that is 100% identical to another article in our system.
When comparing whether an article is duplicate or duplicative, we compare against live, deleted, in-review and our own secret database of known non-exclusive rights (PLR) article database.
Months ago we made the decision to invest even more heavily in our anti-duplicative content identification on incoming and articles flowing through our systems.
Reason: Duplicate content and variations on duplicate content adds no value for our users; and thus is a liability that threatens credibility for us and every good-standing member of EzineArticles.com.
We’ve been at this duplicate content identification business since early 2005. That means each revision of our software gets even more finely tuned. Lately, many older members have been editing articles from months or years past only to find their revision being rejected for duplicate content. As you can guess, this makes them angry because we had already accepted their duplicate content by accident when our systems weren’t as finely tuned as they are now.
The ambiguity of this issue: We’re not able to share the cut-off percentages or the tweaking we do on a daily basis to our anti-duplicate content checking to prevent gaming of our systems. In addition, we’ll be sweeping the entire database this quarter.
What we can do: Effective today, we will notify members who submit or edit an article if it is a duplicate or duplicative of their own article along with telling them which article specifically of their own they were duplicating. In addition, we’re re-sweeping our live article database with our updated software and will be giving further manual attention to members that have articles that are duplicative in too high of a percentage.
Seems fair to me! PLR articles are usually pretty low quality anyway, so for users to have submitted them, they should make at least 50% of the changes to customize them. It should also protect against plaigerism.
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