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SEO 101 Duplícate Content

By Dwayne Goerges of www.topwebsitetips.com

Well, you poured over it for hours and you’ve completed writing a master piece! Your next article is finished and you want the entire world to see it. Should you put the article on more than one site? What does Google (and the other search engines) feel about duplicate content? Is there really a Duplicate content Penalty?

Probably, the best way to start this is trying to get the point of view of the search engines. Why is duplicate content even an issue to them? Remember that the search engines want to keep the searcher happy, and to keep the searcher happy, the search engine need to provide the most relevant results possible for the search and give the searcher as many choices as possible. While a single article may be the most relevant article on the subject, the searcher doesn’t want to see the same article listed in the search results over and over for every site that has hosted the article.

Is there really a Duplicate Content Penalty? That is really a point of view. Reasonably Google will only show one instance of the article in the search results (at least that’s what they try to do). Therefore Google needs to make a decision as to which site with the same article they want to list in the results. So from one point of view you can say all the sites that did not get put in the results were penalized. However that is not really true, the sites were not penalized, they just weren’t chosen to represent the article, only one should reasonably be listed.

How is this not a penalty? Just because the search engine needed to choose what they felt was the original publisher of the article (or the strongest publisher), doesn’t mean that all the rest were ignored. Let’s say your article was published on 10 strong, trusted sites and in the article was a link back to your site. While only one publisher of the article will be in the search engines, you still had 9 other trusted sites that liked the article enough to add it to their site. Therefore, while we can’t read the minds of the Google programmers, we can assume that they likely will give link weight from each of the sites that host the article and link, back to you (the link weight being based on the strength of the site and the article page).

Do we have proof that duplicate articles do not hurt the site that Google counts as the original? Yes, think of all the strong news sites that republish AP articles. Neither AP or the news site is hurt by republishing the article, however the sites republishing the article would probably not get many search engine referrals if all of their content was republished content, they need to make sure that the majority of the content is unique (first time published) in order to get the search engine visits. Sites that are based entirely on republished or duplicate content are quite likely penalized; after all they are not adding anything new to the internet. Don’t let your site fall into this category; most of the articles on your site should be unique, not published on any other site.

Should you put articles already published on one site (Squidoo, Qondio, Hubpages) on another site? Depending on what you want to accomplish, yes you can. But remember you are going to get limited results. While you may get the link authority from the republished article, the article will not likely get very good search engine results. One of the advantages to using these sites is that they not only give you a link from a strong site, you can also make money from the traffic that goes to the page. Republished content will not give you near as much traffic.

Should I republish articles I have written for my own site on other site (Squidoo, Qondio, Hubpages). No! Why not? Remember that likely your first goal is to promote your own site. There is no guarantee the search engines are going to chose your site to list in the search engine results, they are going to chose what they think is the best site. Articles written for your site should remain unique to your site.

Bottom line? It is best to write a unique article each time you publish to a major site. While you might use a previously published article for an article distribution site, for the sites that you are going to put effort into to promote, it is best to start out with a fresh article. This gives you the best chance of having the article rank well in the search engines giving you traffic, a little income from the ads on the page and finally a strong, related link back to your own website.

Contributor's Note

This is the fourth in a series of SEO 101 articles I am writing. I am a 10 year veteran of website building and promotion. These articles outline some of the basic steps I use to promote my clients websites.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

Wildnet Technologies
Review of Wildnet Technologies SEO work
www.topwebsitetips.com/seocompanyreviews....aspx

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Thank you for sharing this valuable information, Dwayne.
I've written some 60 articles here, and I don't know what to do with them to further benefit our website.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
frederick

I did a quick review of your site (key emphasis on quick, I spend 2-5 hours on a full review). Of the shopping cart sites, yours does a pretty good job. Only thing I don't like is it uses numbers in the URL instead of words based on the product.

You've done pretty well with making the Titles and meta descriptions unique. Next would come using your stats and keyword research to tweek the pages for better results (future intels).

Almost all your links go to the front page. You need more links to the internal pages. Pages like your Tutorials (backgammon) are great. Find ways to get links to them.

While all links from a good site can help, links from a related page have far more weight. Consider writing some rules and guide intels, add new "sites" to your profile (same site but pointing to interior pages of your site) and use these in your intels.

Also, consider spreading the love a little. While Qondio is great, Google only counts a limited number of links from each site, the rest of the links appear to be counted at some lower level or not counted. Start using other sites Squidoo, Hubpages and others. A little interlinking between these sites can help your intels, hubs and lenses rank better as well as provide a more powerful link to your main site.

Just some thoughts :) future intels (SEO 101 Series) will go in to each of these in more detail.

"...we can assume that they likely will give link weight from each of the sites that host the article and link, back to you..."

I've had sites dropped from the Google index on the basis of a duplicate article on strong Web 2.0 properties. I've had people steal content and found my articles and sites dropped into the supplemental results.

Your conclusion that Google is looking for new and fresh content is correct. The more competitive your niche is, the greater the penalties for duplicate content.

Sorry to hear that. While I'm sure there are exceptions, dropping a page and especially an entire site from the index due to one duplicate content page is not the norm. If it was there would be a LOT less sites on the internet and that would include a lot of news sites getting dropped. I'm guessing that more was involved than just the duplicate page.

Still, it is never a good idea to put an article from your own site on a site that is stronger, the likelihood of your page disappearing for its position in the search engine results is VERY good.

[...]the sites republishing the article would probably not get many search engine referrals if all of their content was republished content, they need to make sure that the majority of the content is unique (first time published) in order to get the search engine visits.

Actually they do allow for duplicate content. They just want it published and indexed here first. :)

No doubt the idea being that if they were the first place with the content and the strongest (currently pr 7), they will be one that Google prefers in the search engine results (and they are probably right)

I really appreciate this intel as it answers some questions that have been on my mind for some time. I will definitely check out the other intels in your series and will look forward to future ones.

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