The Duplicate Content Debate

Author : Tiva KellyWhat is duplicate content, you ask? Some people may require hours of explanation to understand it, and the end result would still be more confusion But you may be surprised at how simple it really is

Types of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content generally refers to blocks of content on one website or across multiple domains that are identical or almost identical Websites with identical content often don’t pass search engine filters, and lose page rank The lower page rank your website has, the fewer visitors you will receive

Example: You want to sell your product or service online You use a product description which is successfully used by the majority of resellers across other websites Search engines see exact blocks of text as duplicate content When people search for the item you’re selling, your website will not come up first, because you used duplicate content

Example: Your product may be listed under several categories like top rated, most popular, and kitchen items If each of those categories link to a subcategory of knives, each of these categories will be linked from the same site Search engines see the subcategory as a normal category and believe you’re using duplicate content on your own website

Example: You’re starting an online business and through your research, you find the perfect website Someone beat you to it You come to the conclusion that they will never know if you copy their text After all, it’s just words, right? Because their website was indexed first, search engines see yours as duplicate content and your page rank is penalized

Example: Your page rank is slipping so you choose to beef it up by legitimately using articles from another author The twist in your plan is that you plan to use several different keywords to bring even more attention to your site with their article Unfortunately, if the original author’s keywords are not kept intact, you’ve effectively changed their article Your page rank will be penalized

What about Article Marketing?

Article marketing spreads your article to a wide variety of article directories, but it does not cause duplicate content penalties Search engines use programs called “spiders” to “crawl” website content When these spiders crawl article directories, they can easily see that the content originated from your website because of your author resource box

Unintentional Duplicate Content

Because creating duplicate content is usually not malicious and is unintentional, the first thing you must do to avoid this is to pay attention to what you are doing Do your research first If you want to have the same content as an already established site or domain, it is likely that the search engines may not even display your pages

Type in what you want to have as your keywords, type in the title of your domain and see what comes up If your idea is not original and unique, recreate it and make it work for you anyway You don’t need to rethink the concept of your entire website, just the way you word it

What are the Duplicate Content Penalties?

Duplicate content penalties may not worry you if you already have a low page rank Search engine ranking is largely determined by content and keywords If you’re proudly displaying duplicate content, your website will be filtered by search engines and your page rank will drop It’s that simple Tiva Kelly is the Head of Article Coaching and offers advice to authors at
Article Marketer, a highly popular article distribution service. Grab our free report about dupicate content to here.

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