Avoid Duplicate Content
One of the most important elements of building and maintaining a “SEO Friendly” website is to completely avoid duplicate content.
What is Duplicate Content?
There are two forms of duplicate content.
- You copy someone else’s content for use on you page.
- Someone copies your content for use on their page.
Google’s mission statement states “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. So how would Google be able to accomplish their mission when your ordinary Internet surfer typed in “Photography” and Wikipedia displayed as the #1 page with relevant information about a Photography, then for the next 3 pages it was the same exact content as the wiki page except on 50 different websites that stole their content. I think you are starting to catch my drift. That would probably get you frustrated if you were looking to buy a camera, and you would think twice about using Google the next time you had to search for something on the web.
Therefor, Google has guys like Matt Cutts on staff to monitor, detect, and punish duplicate content spammers. Although this problem may seem trivial, and you probably have never stolen any one else’s content, you must still remain proactive in detecting duplicate content. And although most people think that Google is intelligent enough to distinguish between cache dates and such, believe it or not- they still don’t have this problem figured out 100% yet.
As the original author of web content, you may wake up one morning only to find your site penalized, because remember Google’s real concern is minimizing duplicate content, not arbitrating the rightful owner.
How do I know when I’m penalized and what can I do about it?
When Google or any other search engine discovers a duplicate content issue, they act and they act very fast. They will either:
- OMIT your website completely from all the search results.
- Place your website in what is called the supplemental index.
Aaron Wall, author of The SEO Book posted a great article:
What are Google Supplemental Results?
The good news, there are FREE tools that assist in the discovery of duplicate content. One of the most popular tools is Copyscape. This is a FREE service that goes out on your behalf and searches the web for content similar or identical to the content on your website. Although I suggest just using the FREE service, if you really want to protect yourself from duplicate content, CopyScape also offers an upgraded version of their software that provides unlimited amounts of scans and help identify, detect and notifiy you with any acts of plagiarism.
If you detect duplicate content immediately report it as SPAM to all three major search engines.
Interesting article, but one question.
At what point does content become duplicate?
A phrase?
A sentence?
2 sentences?
A paragraph?
Obviously setting up links uses certain key phrases or a sentence or two. How is that viewed?
Thanks
Great Blog – I just signed up for your RSS Feed.
Looking forward to more of your posts.
Thanks
Your friends at the Wedding Favors Association of Atlanta, GA
You suggest in an earlier post to submit articles to Ezine as well as Articles Base. If I were to post on both sites, would that be considered duplicate content? Also would posting to both hurt, instead of help my cause?
If so, Which would be better for me?
Hi Mary,
Great Question. This would be my suggestion.
Ezinearticles.com and Articlesbase.com are the TWO most trusted, SEO result driven Article Directories on the web therefore for those two ONLY submit Unique content to each. However there are hundreds if not thousands of other less popular article directories that you may mass distribute articles to. The idea with this is to create a blog on your site, publish a unique article, wait for Google to crawl the article (to do so go to google and type cache:http://www.your-blog-post-url.com i.e. cache:http://www.weddingseoblog.com/wedding-internet-marketing/avoid-duplicate-content/). If Google has cached your page you should see a gray box above your website that reads This is Google’s cache of. It also displays the time and date that it was cached. Once you see that your page has been cached (in Google’s eyes you originated this content and now have the proper credit). Now what you can do is submit that article to as many article directories as possible using a max of 3 anchor texts of choice. Make sure that one of those anchors are pointing back to the original blog post url though….
Summery:
1) Only publish Unique Content to EzineArticles.com & Articlesbase.com (You will be very surprised by the SEO results)
2) Mass-distribute your blog posts AFTER they have been cached by Google (Great way to build hundreds of links from 1 article) Not to worry about Duplicate content, since you were the first person to publish the article in Googles eyes) The article directories will get penalized for it, but you still benefit from a link, and in the world of SEO — links are like GOLD.
I hope this helps – Good Luck
-Jason Hennessey
“Not to worry about Duplicate content, since you were the first person to publish the article in Googles eyes) The article directories will get penalized for it, but you still benefit from a link, and in the world of SEO — links are like GOLD.”
I would think with all the PHd’s at Google they could write a script into their algorithm that gives you credit just for the first link they find from duplicate content. I know for a fact that not all the places you submit that article will ever show up in google webmaster tools or even the yahoo explorer tool. After all, mass submitting to articles and gaining 100s of new links inside the same exact content isn’t exactly natural looking.