Duplicate Content – The Issue
The issue of duplicate content is not a new phenomenon. It’s been around even before the word blogging was coined and has existed online since the world wide web started. Back then, though, it was more of a copyright infringement issue among authors.
But the internet has become so hugely competitive and prone to abuse. Many webmasters tried to outsmart search engines by placing similar contents in different URLs in an attempt to squeeze out a huge amount of traffic from them. Of course, it became a headache to SEs. Imagine you are in a grocery store with your friends buying milk. There are different brands to choose from but each of your friends has their own preference. Now, you are stuck and you don’t know which one to choose. You are most likely going to end up not buying one, aren’t you?
Search engines waste valuable resources in order to crawl, analyze and detect those pages. Finally since the duplicate content reduces the quality of the search results, this problem also affects the search engine users. And when that happens, searches decrease which adversely affect their revenue. It’s no wonder why some pages with duplicate contents are omitted in the search engine result page. You don’t want this to happen to your site especially if it is a legit one.
source: webseoanalytics.com
But when really is a duplicate content considered a duplicate content?
Good question.
There have been many write-ups about this. Some are true but many are just myths. So it is best to get the information directly from the Google People. I don’t have access to them but they have blogs. In the video below, Greg Grothaus gave a talk about Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues.
The video above was taken in 2009 but is still very much helpful to identify potential duplicate content issues and how to solve them. You can view the slideshow below.
But what if I submitted an article to different article submission sites for syndication. Would they be considered duplicate contents? Matt Cutts responded to a similar question in his blog.
However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
To sum up, we can use the following guidelines to avoid the dupe issue:
- Use 301s
- Be consistent with the URLs you use. Remember that http://www.yoursite.com/page is different from http://www.yoursite.com/page/
- Use top-level domains:
- Syndicate carefully
- Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).
- Minimize boilerplate repetition
- Avoid publishing stubs
- Understand your content management system
- Minimize similar content
What about the scrapers duplicating my contents?
Google is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites (especially blog scrapers). They are are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve their algorithms. Go to http://goo.gl/S2hIh and fill out the form.
No comments yet.