Noindex duplicate content penalty?

[Grumpy_Carl]

We know that google now gives a penalty to a whole duplicate if it finds content it doesn't like or is duplicate content, but has anyone experienced a penalty from having duplicate content on their site which they have added noindex to? Would google still apply the penalty to the overall quality of the site even though they have been told to basically ignore the duplicate bit.

Reason for asking is that I am looking to add a forum to one of my websites and no one likes a new forum. I have a script which can populate it with thousands of questions and answers pulled direct from Yahoo Answers. Obviously the forum wil be 100% duplicate content but I do not want it to rank for anyway anyway so if I noindex  the forum pages hopefully it will not damage the rest of the site.

In time, as the forum grows, all the duplicate posts will be deleted but it's hard to get people to use an empty forum so need to 'trick' them into thinking the section is very busy.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Yes, I agree the ideal solution would be to make the content unique, however all being well, I will have about 20,000 threads and 50,000 posts added in a month. The other main reason for doing is it the forum script creates users as assigns posts to them so the forum will also seem to have about 5,000 active users.

Removing the duplicate content would be easy enough, can run an sql query and remove all posts before x date,

[de4e]

Do you really want to double your work? Parse and later remove forums content?

I think will be much better rewrite yahoo answers, of course it need more time and resources, but your content will be unique. And you've got search traffic much faster. It's ease to find cheap rewrites, who fill your forum very fast.

[itrogers]

Maybe what you should do is add the rel="canonical" attribute on your page/thread to the corresponding Yahoo answers page. This will certainly tell Google who the "original owner" is. If you want to block from search engines also, keep the noindex and also block Googlebot in robots.txt for that sub directory.

[Grumpy_Carl]

Sorry, just thought of something else....

Instead of the no index would blocking google from the /forum/ directory in htaccess be even better? I'm guessing that it would. With noindex we are telling Google not to index the content but it is still reading it. With a block we are not even showing Google the bad content in the first place so it doesn't know there is any duplicate content.