Nolo, the large legal book publisher, is planning a new marketing strategy. The new strategy is called SEO and their plan is to post portions of their book for Google and other search engines to index.
The Nolo representative asked Google that since this content is in Google Book Search, would it be considered duplicate content if they put this content out there for Google web search to index.
Nolo explained:
I work for Nolo, a well known publisher of consumer oriented legal books. As part of our effort to build our organic traffic base to our large network of sites as well as Nolo.com, we've begun re-purposing some of our book content for the web. One example is this section on our landlord tenant law site: http://www.landlordtenantlawfirms.com/resources/landlord-and-tenant/commercial-leasesAll of the articles in this section are from a book, and much (not all) of the article content is viewable in google books. Is there a potential for "penalization" due to duplicate content? Will it even GET indexed in the first place? Should I dial down the amount of content I allow google books to show? Will I need to just remove my books completely?
Google's Pierre Far said it would be fine and should not result in a penalty of any kind. Pierre said:
Generally cross-index content like this shouldn't be a problem and if you own the content it wouldn't be a reason for a penalty. To give you a similar example, many sites publish content in both Google News and web search.
What do you think? I am not too sure about this. Although I think Nolo has the awesome unique content and they should use it - they need to be careful with it.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
