Some people believe that there is no such thing as duplicate content or any penalty imposed on sites for it.

I laugh at that suggestion because I have seen physical evidence of its' existence before my very eyes many times over the last few months. There was a time, if you Googled me you would get a staggering 95,000 results. Suddenly without any warning, it dropped to around 23,000.

This was a clear indication that the search engine had dropped most of the results because they were too similar (that is what duplicate content means).

This is very serious business indeed. It means that while previously there were 95,000 indexed documents online with my name on them and mostly a link or at least mention of one of my sites. Overnight that number dwindled to only 23,000. It should be obvious that the more indexed pages out there that have a link leading to your site, the more traffic you will end up getting. Therefore the immediate effect was less traffic for my sites. Less traffic means less revenue. It means that all that work and effort I put in had suddenly been cut down to size.

This is the main reason why duplicate content should be a subject of great concern to anybody with an online presence. It also means that the rewards will always be enormous for anybody who learns enough about it to get round it and avoid duplicate content penalties from search engines.

Anybody who claims the duplicate content thing does not exist should have their heads examined.