Duplicate Content Matters, Deal With it!

While professional bloggers and webmasters know a great deal when it comes to the value of duplicate content, we are still seeing a number of websites whereby they promote “my other” blog or “my other” site that shows exactly the same content as the other site. The only difference is the domain name. Our conclusion is that they may be newbies and simply unaware of the effects of their actions. So we come up with this article.

What is duplicate content?

Simply it is text content that is shown elsewhere in the internet- either in your other web pages or other people’s web pages. It is a copy of the same article found in another page in the internet.

More exposure of same content=More Traffic?

When we maintain multiple websites, there is the tendency to cross-promote published articles from within these websites- thinking it would promote the articles more and get added exposure. For most, a simple cut and paste of the entire article does the trick. It stems from the idea that “the more places I put it out there, the more people would see it, so my traffic will increase!” That line of thinking comparably, is like reproducing a book for distribution so more people could get to it.

Unfortunately, that only works in actual products or services for distribution offline. What we do online with our published articles has consequential effects in terms of search engine optimization and rankings. For the unaware, the simple syndication of our articles in feeds and aggregators already qualifies as duplicate content. Same goes as say, maintaining a blog in Blogspot and allowing your Multiply or Facebook account to show the same articles in the respective accounts.

Duplicate content matters to Search engines

Although there is no direct duplicate content penalty, you are making it hard for search engines to rank your individual web pages when it is also available from another source, either the same or nearly the same content. They may be considered duplicate even if they are not fully identical. In this case, search engines will only list or show one version of the content in their search results and you better hope it is your website appearing on the search and not some other sites that syndicated your article without a permanent link back to your original article!

When search engines find duplicate contents, their search algorithm will determine which one is the better article to show in the results. That is only understandable as you don’t want to be typing a keyword and finding four articles with the same exact content found on different web pages. Google and others will filter those articles out and pick the best to show in the result. They would base it on the number and quality of the inbound links connected to the content.

How to avoid Duplicate content

• If you must show the same article in your other web pages, choose which one you want Google and others to show in search results. Remember that search engines also see the printer version, mobile version when available on your site on top of your regular content version. Hide the others. How? By Adding a noindex meta tag to your duplicate contents. We showed you how in this previous article:

REP META tag: How Google and Other Search Engines Find Your Website

• Require back links from other sources. If you syndicate your articles, make sure the articles point back to your website so search engines know where the content came from. They may like the other content from another site not your own, then your article will not show up in search at all.

Some tips and more explanation on duplicate content from Google may be found on the Webmaster Help center.

What about snippets or quotations?

It’s all right to get a summary or some quotations and lines from your own original article to place it on another site of your own. We stress original article as copying someone else’s article and claiming it your own is a whole different issue- and a serious one at that. That is called plagiarism and original articles are in fact copyrighted and is protected by law. You can not just copy another else’s work. When you do, that is also a duplicate content and it will show.

Copyscape.com can detect duplicate content!

Make your own original unique content for your websites and avoid getting penalized by Google or by copyright laws.

Here is a tool checker we found to detect duplicate contents from two websites. They give our results in percentage and basically, the lower the percentage- the lower your chances of being penalized by search engines for duplicate content. When checking, you would want a lower percentage result and not higher.

Note: This tool when used will open another browser leading to the host’s website where it can yield the result and interpret it.