How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties

How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties We've all heard of duplicate content and most webmasters know that its a negative step to use it on a web site.

But what exactly is it and why is it bad?

Duplicate content is exactly as its name implies - it's content that's the same as content already on the net - an article or a passage of text that exactly matches an article or passage of text on another web site. The same words, in the same order, with almost the same punctuation.

Basically it's stolen, thieved material. Material written by another person and used on a thief's web site. Stolen by a web master who hasn't got the skill to write a unique article, or more than likely, stolen by a lazy webmaster.

Duplicate content is severely frowned upon by the search engines and punished accordingly. A web site with a page deemed by the search engines to be comprised basically of pirated content will be accorded a lower SERPS positioning or worse still, will be banned altogether, at the discretion of the search engine. Anyone using SEO to achieve a high SERPS position with stolen content is deceiving himself. A high SERPS position is impossible with duplicate content on the web site. It just won't happen.

However there is a way for an article originally shown on another web site to be legitimately displayed on another site without incurring search engine penalties. This is a method I use to add a degree of professionalism to one of my own web sites.

This site promotes an obesity-prevention product and includes pages devoted to obesity news from throughout the world. I keep the pages up to date with the latest news and usually include between 4 to 6 news items on each page.

I regularly trawl the internet looking for the latest news on anything to do with obesity, whether it be government initiatives, research from medical institutions, or personal stories. The content is copied as is - it's not doctored or changed around. I try to include the whole content where possible, but if the article is unduly long, I may copy only the first few paragraphs but ensuring I retain the general theme of the item.

So how do I get around the search engines' duplicate content rules?

I include in the article the full title, the location where I found the news item, and the date. So if I found an item about a speech made by the Canadian Health Minister on the subject of obesity and Canadian school children, I would copy the article intact without a single amendment, with the original title, and date, and the name of the news source, such as the Toronto Mail and Globe or Reuters. All this would appear on my web page.

What I am in fact doing is telling the search engines that in the public interest I'm informing them of the latest developments to combat obesity. The search engines must feel that this information reinforces my site as an authoritative source of obesity news. And how do I know the search engines view my copied content kindly? Because from time to time my pages with this content get a good position on the SERPS.

Similarly those webmasters who obtain content from article submission sites are doing themselves a disservice if they don't follow the publisher rules laid down: the article must be copied in its entirety without any changes; all links must remain intact; the authors' information must be displayed without change; and the article submission sites' link must remain. If these guidelines are adhered to, then the person copying the original content will not experience any search engine duplicate content penalties.

However if the publisher guidelines are ignored and, for example, the authors' information or the article submission sites' links are omitted, then the search engines will penalize not only the respective page but the whole site. This is because the search engines will conclude that the whole of the site is engaged in using duplicate content.

This basic rule to avoid duplicate content penalties, however, does not apply to content taken directly from a web site. If someone copied the text from one of my web sites and put it on their own site, then that is stolen duplicate content Attributing the article to my site will not allow the thief to avoid penalties in the way that an attributed article from Reuters or AAP will.

Summing up then, copying an article from a recognized news source or from an article submission site will not incur the wrath of search engines providing the article is attributed to its original source. Failure to do so could result in a site being banned by the search engines, with Google being particularly harsh.

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