The Real Debate About Duplicate Content
After having spent considerable time on Internet marketing and blogging forums, I continue to see discussions raging about duplicate content…in regards to how it affects search engine optimization. There are multiple ways in which this practice will have an impact on your search results. Ever since webmasters started optimizing sites for SE’s, there has been talk about duplicate content.
Whether you run multiple sites and post overlapping content, or someone else re-posts your content (this is very common) exactly as your wrote it, regardless of the reasoning, duplicate content is a large issue facing webmasters. Even if you have good intentions about posting the same articles or posts, it’s important to understand what you’re getting into.
Duplicate What?…Never Heard of It
If you’re new to Meta Fever, or to the Internet Marketing game in general, don’t let all this talk about duplicate, re-posting, optimizing…etc, confuse you. Anytime I talk about a potentially confusing subject which could be beneficial to you (if you understand it)…it’s important to cover some of the basics.
Like I mentioned before, duplicate content is any instance where more than one website has the same articles or posts displayed word for word. The search engines have never set a threshold and said ,”if articles are 80% or 90% alike” than it will be deemed as duplicate content. This is why original publishers will always win out in the end.
Tell Me…Why Is This a Problem?
The purpose of search engines is to deliver quality content to it’s users at a quick rate. No one wants to perform a search and then see repeated results for the same information. Should this happen (or anything related to making results poor), will result in the SE becoming defunct and finding a comfortable place in the graveyard of Internet yesteryear.
With this said, search engines seek to filter all duplicate content and then display the most relevant link to the user. Of course, this is not always possible. Should you run duplicate content on your sites, there is a good chance the site will be overlooked in favor of the original source (I’ll explain how search engines determine this in a few).
Of course search engines may penalize you for stealing or re-posting the same content…however, since your goal is to rank as high as possible in the rankings, focus less on the penalty and more on staying in the good graces of SE’s.
And…How Do Search Engines Fix This?
Once the search engine scans the stratosphere of information, and all of that content is placed into a database…the task of filtering and ranking begins. Of course no one knows the exact algorithms Google and Bing use, there are a few clues they use to solve the mystery of duplicate content:
- Can the domain be trusted? Domain age, amount of time on current server, spam abuse reports.
- Does the site link back to original content? If so, than maybe it was copying just for the ease of the reader.
- Where is the original source of the content? Most SE’s can make this determination.
- Does the content look like it was written by a human? Even though software is getting better at disguising this…sometimes you can tell if it has been scraped from another site.
Once one of these questions is answered, the content is then reviewed and a determination is made.
Solving the Duplicate Content Problem
Since we’ve covered what duplicate content is, and how search engines filter it out…there are some steps you can take to avoid being penalized and gain maximum search engine exposure.
At least search engines haven’t left webmasters in the dark on this issue. Google released an article covering tips in dealing with duplicate content.
Of course you can avoid this issue by writing 100% original content…but how do you control what other webmasters do? Well, it’s not a perfect system but there are some things you can do to increase your luck.
Google recommends using 301 redirects to show anyone (including search engines) where visitors should go and which content you want indexed.
Also, since search engines rank pages and not websites, take extra care when duplicating content within your site. Even re-posting an article on another page can be potentially damning. Google released a technical guide for dealing with this.
Wish Me Luck
Well, no one can have enough of this. Just like avoiding injury in a car accident, you can wear your seat belt, travel during the day, buy a Volvo…but you never completely eliminate the risk.
Take the above tips, implement them and keep doing what you know is right. Leave the rest up to the Internet gods.
