2 Comments Written by Robert on August 17, 2008 – 8:32 pm

Avoiding duplicate content is critical to achieving and maintaining favorable, long-standing, organic search-engine rankings. A trustworthy content writer understands the importance of writing and maintaining original content on a Web site. Search engines award original content and penalize identical content, making it absolutely necessary that you write unique content for your Web site. You also want to ensure that no plagiarists utilize your content for use on their pages.

The discovery of duplicate content on your Web site

The discovery of duplicate content on your Web site prompts search engines to penalize you with lower rankings or omit your pages from the search results altogether. Tools exist that allow you to scan the Web for instances of duplicate copy and prevent plagiarism of your work from ever happening.

One of the essential characteristics of building and maintaining a Web site that ranks well in search engines is avoiding instances of duplicate content. Avoiding duplicate content issues allows you to eliminate penalties that are applied by search engines when duplicate content issues are discovered. Instances of duplicate content arise in one of two primary ways: you copy someone else’s content for use on your page, or someone else copies your content for use on their page. Duplicate content infractions occur when multiple Web sites contain identical or similar content.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Although this problem may seem trivial, especially if you feel that you have not copied anyone else’s content, you still must remain vigilant because someone may very well attempt to poach your content. It is also important to appreciate that search-engine algorithms do not have a good basis for determining who stole whose content.

As a result, you may very well be the original author, but you may be penalized because Google’s real concern is minimizing duplicate content, not arbitrating the rightful owner. The discovery of duplicate content on your Web site prompts search engines to either omit your Web site completely from all search results, or place your content within the dreaded supplemental results. Supplemental results are not part of the main search results index and rarely if ever appear to a search-engine user. Getting your Web site kicked out of the index or placed within the supplemental results must be avoided.

Fortunately, tools exist that allow you to search for instances of duplicate content. One of the most commonly used tools is Copyscape, located at www.copyscape.com. Copyscape is a free service that searches the Web and identifies pages with content similar or identical to your own. In addition, Copyscape offers a free plagiarism warning banner that you can display on your Web site to deter others from stealing your work.

You can sign up for Copyscape Premium if you want advanced protection from plagiarists. The premium membership carries a fee but provides unlimited searches for copies of your Web pages and helps to track and eliminate acts of plagiarism.

One of the most common forms of content theft occurs when content spammers create automated systems that steal content and simultaneously post it to so-called Made-for-AdSense Web sites. Made-for-AdSense, or MFA, Web sites attempt to monetize Web traffic from contextual advertisements, usually from Google AdSense or the Yahoo Publisher Network, by using unethical search-engine optimization tricks, including the use of plagiarized content, which can result in top search-engine rankings.

If your content has been copied by someone attempting to profit from an MFA or similar Web site, your best bet is to immediately report the spam to the search engines. You can submit reports of spam to Google at www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. You can submit reports of spam to Yahoo at http://help.yahoo. com/l/us/yahoo/search/spam_abuse.html. You can submit reports of spam to Microsoft at http://feedback. live.com/eform.aspx?productkey=wlaccounts&mkt=en-us.

Another common occurrence of duplicate content arises when e-commerce merchants distribute product data to content distribution partners such as comparison shopping engines and affiliate marketers. Duplication of content occurs when the product titles and descriptions sent to the comparison engines or affiliates are identical to the content on the merchant’s Web site. The most successful way to minimize this common problem is to write unique titles and descriptions for all your products when submitting them to comparison engines and affiliates.