Duplicate Content Clarified and Help Is Now Available
Once the Internet really started to gain ground, and more and more websites popped up everywhere you looked, it wasn’t long before people started looking for shortcuts when it came to their own content.
Think about it, if you had 10 websites and had to write content for those 10 websites, this could get a little tedious. Especially if one of the sites could overlap with another one. For example, a site about Affiliate Marketing and one about Search Engine Optimization.
In many cases, webmasters used shortcuts to lessen their load and would use the same content on both of these sites. Not only that, with the popularity of article marketing, now not nearly as prevalent as it used to be, these same website owners needed to get their articles syndicated and what better way, then to use content they already wrote right?
What happened along the way however, was something called a duplicate content issue. This meant that the search engines were finding duplicate, or at least incredibly similar content across a wide variety of sites. They had to keep their users happiness in mind and make sure that they were delivering relevant content. So adjustments were made, some sites were penalized for having this duplicate content, while others seemed to rise above the fray.
Aside from these two issues; using the same content on sites owned by the same person and submitting the same article to article directories, there was also a third culprit which is called scraped content. This is essentially those programs that promise you that all you need to do is install a blog, and they’ll do the rest (for a fee). Generally this “rest” that they would do would be to take content already available across the Internet, add it to your blog and viola! you had instant content. Not exactly a great idea.
And while written content is the major culprit here, duplicate content isn’t just contained to articles. It can be in the form of something as similar as the structure of a website. Yep, if your website setup looked a lot like another site’s content, this too could be considered duplicate content.
Now, you might think you’re out of the woods if you’ve never done any of these things, if you only own one website for example, if you’ve never syndicated articles, or never touched a program that published stuff for you, etc., but you might not know that even if you only own just one website, the content on your site might actually be considered duplicate. Why?
This often occurs when a site owner hasn’t structured their site properly using the canonical link element. As a matter of fact, in case you weren’t aware, Google considers the following sites completely different from one another:
- http://Somesite.com
- http://www.Somesite.com
- http://Somesite.com/
- http://www.Somesite.com/
Yes, they all go to “Somesite.com” but as far as Google is concerned, these are all separate websites and if you’re canonical isn’t set up correctly you could have been penalized and not even know it.
Google helped website owners make huge strides when it introduced this canonical link element. Without this, Google may think that you’re publishing the same exact content on multiple different websites.
But there are other ways too that you can be sure you aren’t falling into this trap. One of the most recent pieces of help that Google has given to us is something that you’ll find within Google’s Webmaster Tools. In the event that you haven’t yet added a canonical link element to your web pages but you HAVE set up a Google Webmaster Tools account, Google will now notify you if it detects duplicate content.
In addition to this simple change however, there are other things that you can do as well to avoid it all together.
The easiest one to avoid is using articles that other people have written on your site as content. While it might seem really easy to do (and it is), Google will likely have already located the original document and your site will be considered the “duplicate”. Which further means that you likely won’t show up in the search engines for the keyword you want.
Another big issue that comes into play is when you’re moving your own website. If you do decide to move an existing site to a new domain, it’s incredibly important that you use a 301 redirect. This will help the search engines understand that you are permanently moving the data from one site to another.
Lastly, to make absolutely certain that your content is attributed to you and no one else, use the rel=author attribute on your articles. This way, Google will know that you were the original author of the content and in the event that someone else uses your content without your permission, then Google will know it was you who originally wrote the content in the first place.