Understanding Duplicate Content And How To Avoid It

I am sure you must have heard about duplicate content or come across a discussion somewhere on the web.

Duplicate content issue is not only confusing but also controversial.

While some people go at lengths to explain the duplicate content and the penalties involved, others say play it cool.

But the issue exists and in my view search engines are getting better at it.

With release of canonical url tag and its support across the domains, the search engines especially Google are giving ample signals that they take duplicate content seriously.

If you do not understand much about the issue, this article would help you.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate ontent is said to exist when two or more webpages have same content. The webpages might be on the same websites or across the websites. That means same titles and similar word usage.

Let us say you write an article which you post on your blog and you also submit it to article directory. Because both the web pages have same content posted, it becomes original on one and duplicate on the other in eyes of search engines.

What Is The Problem?

The problem is to the search engines. Search engines are in business. There business is dependent on delivering the relevant information. They would like to display the best results for a query asked.

Better they are in this, better their business is.

Search engine works by indexing the pages and ranking the pages. If it indexes all the duplicate pages, then it would deliver all the pages for a relevant query.

It would not be a good experience for the users t visit 10 pages ten times to find that all of them have same content.

Therefore search engines  attempt to filter all of the duplicate content and select the most relevant page based on their own criteria.

The duplicate pages would not be indexed.

Is There A Penalty?

I doubt that. The disadvantage of duplicate content is that the page looses chance of getting to top of the search engine results.

Is Your Page Original?

During the process of indexing, the content of the page would be compared to others with similar content. Then the attempt is made to denote the orignal.

There are many factors involved but I think most important would be which page was found first.

So considering our previous example, if you submit your article to article directory first where it would be picked up by search engine sooner, and you publish it later on your blog, your blog page may not be indexed.

There are a few things you can do to avoid duplicate content issue.

• Write your own content or get it written uniquely. If you use private label rights articles, add your uniqueness to them. Cutting and pating these articles may be a waste of time.
• Do not spread your articles across the directories. Making it unique would help. You can do it manually or try something like Mass Article Control
• Adding canonical tag when the article is on your websites.

Please feel free to share your tips and tricks to deal with the duplicate content.

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