Forum Moderators: rogerd
I have been associated with a finance forum for more than an year now. At times I have come across a rather peculiar situation - if someone just uses the copy-paste method while posting in different forums, will Google and other SEs see it as duplicate content in a site?
What I mean to ask is, should such posts be moderated in anyway or they can stay without harming forums in the long run.
Thanks for any help.
On the other hand, it doesn't pay to encourage people who post the same thing all over - it bores widely-read visitors, and can be encouraging people with 'an agenda' ;)
But it also undermines the uniquity of your forum - what's the point, if it's the same as all the others? Having said that, the occasional duplicate (say, a well meaning member with Big News) won't hurt anyone!
[edited by: Quadrille at 2:40 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2008]
The community desirability of those posts is a bit more questionable - big pasted content dumps with nothing original can be annoying after a while. You can be the judge of that, of course. (And watch out for copyrighted stuff!)
A bigger duplicate content issue with some forums is the ability to reach the same content with different URLs. Eliminating that issue, if it exists on your site, is a lot more important since it affects a lot more than a few random posts. Blogs can be even more afflicted by this issue.
