The Truth About Duplicate Content
When I first started doing online marketing several years ago I made some serious mistakes concerning duplicate content. Mistakes that cost me a lot of time and money. Mistakes that I still see being made all the time by new marketers…
I new nothing of website design, SEO, keyword research, or niche marketing. I only wanted to make money online and I wanted to make lots of money straight away! I was looking for people that could give me a fully functional and profitable online money making factory.
There was no shortage of people that answered the call of this inexperienced and naïve newbie!
Let me give you one example.
I met a guy on eBay that was building and selling “fully optimized” websites. His sites looked great and he had 100% positive feedback. He would typically build a site about a certain niche (for example weight loss), load it with hundreds of articles, monetize it with Google Adsense and then sell about 5 identical sites per niche for $49.95 each.
Hey, this guy did everything! Uploading my site, inserting Adsense using my own code, hosting. He could even help me find a domain name if I did not already have a suitable one. What a deal, or so I thought…
In his eBay ad he stressed how it is possible to make thousands of dollars every month from people clicking the Adsense ads on your website. (Will save you the rest of the hype)
I think I must have bought about 5 of his “cookie cutter” websites! Needless to say, I made nothing… Well, in all honesty, I probably made about $0.05 a month or something like that.
What really irks me is that I see experienced marketers bamboozling new marketers all the time!
I often come across offers promising new marketers a “free website” or hundreds of PLR articles they can use for website content. What rubbish!
Google is very clear on duplicate content:
“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content”
Source: Google – Quality Guidelines
Why does Google hate duplicate content?
It is all about “User Experience”. Google understands that in order to remain the top search engine they need to provide visitors with high quality, relevant information.
Imagine searching for information using a phrase like “best way to lose weight” and all of the top 10 listing on the 1st page of Google shows exactly the same content, maybe just with different site graphics and website urls. Would that be a good “user experience”? No.
“Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information”
Source: Google – Duplicate Content
What are the consequences of using duplicate content?
Google normally chooses the “best” version to display in their search results. This may be the site they deem to be the originator of the content or even a so-called “authority site”.
For example, if you copy an original article on your website and submit it to an article directory such as Ezine Articles you may find that Ezine Articles may outrank you by a long shot.
I recently read an interesting story about a webmaster that noticed (to his dismay) that one of his client’s websites dropped from the 3rd position in Google for a competitive keyword to the 683rd position. He was baffled to say the least, until he discovered that someone copied a blog article and posted it on the website. Soon after the blog article was removed the website regained it’s 3rd position in Google.
How can you proactively address duplicate content issues?
Google lists 10 different techniques, such as:
• Consider blocking pages from indexing: Rather than letting Google’s algorithms determine the “best” version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred version. For instance, if you don’t want us to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.
• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt.
• Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.
Visit Google – Duplicate Content for the full list.
“Similar Content can also be Duplicate Content”
Duplicate content does not mean page A have to be 100% identical to page B. Changing a couple of words here and there does not make it unique!
Matt Cutts from Google once said that if he can put two pages next to each other and determine, just by quickly reading them, that they are more or less duplicates, that you can imagine how much more thorough Google is with their advanced algorithm.
Useful and free tool to detect duplicate content
I like to use CopyScape – They offer a free search function from their website where you simply type in your url and they will return any other sites containing the same content.
This is especially useful if you are concerned that other sites may be plagiarizing your content. It can also come in handy if you have some articles ghostwritten and you want to make sure they are really unique.
I am sure the tool has its own shortcomings but it is free, pretty reliable, quick and easy to use.
Trust you have enjoyed this short little post on duplicate content and that it may help you to avoid some of the mistakes I made…
All the best,
Francois du Toit
Your Host Francois du Toit
December 12th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Francois - I think your blog is excellent. Very straightforward and no fluff.
Now about dup content - I ran a scan with CopyScape and found a site that has copied mine almost word for word. What would you suggest I do about it?
And one more question - If I post an article at ezinearticles and post that same article in my blog, will I be penalized for duplicate content?
Keep up the good work - Neill
December 13th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Hi Neill,
Many thanks for your kind comments.
Regarding your first question… If another site copies your content, they are the ones using duplicate content, not you. In other words, it should not have a negative impact on your site.
This is what Google has to say about it:
“If you find another site is duplicating your content by scraping (misappropriating and republishing) it, it’s unlikely that this will negatively impact your site’s ranking in Google search results pages”
They continue saying: “If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA Request to claim ownership of the content and request removal of the other site from Google’s index”
For further details, refer to:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359
For information on how to file a DMCA Request, please have a look at:
http://www.google.com/dmca.html
You can also try to approach the webmaster directly and request him to remove the duplicate content. However, from my experience this is often a waste of time as such requests are often ignored.
A “Cease and Desist” letter from your attorney will probably have a much bigger impact (but costs money).
Lastly, if you can trace his or her hosting company (try a whois.net search) you can contact them directly and requst them to take action on your behalf. I have found US based hosting companies to be quite willing to help. However, you may have some trouble getting help from non-US hosting companies.
Trust this has answered the first part of your question.
Now for the second part…
If you post an article at ezinearticles and then post that same article in your blog, you are actually posting duplicate content on your blog and may indeed be penalized for it.
It would be better to first post the article on your blog and wait for it to be indexed by Google before submitting it to ezinearticles.
Obviously, the “best” solution would be to only post unique articles on your blog. You can always link to other articles that may benefit your readers.
Wishing you all the very best!
Francois du Toit
September 30th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hi Francois
What do you think about submitting article to multiple article
directories.For me, I think it is my article,thus it is up to us where to
submit the article.Rite?You want traffic rite?So you need more
exposure to your article..
I’d see Willie Crawford also submit his article to submityourarticle.com..
You can see his testimonial there.
Just want some of your opinion about submitting same article
to multiple article sites.I heard too many opinions on this issue.
Azim
September 30th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Hi Azim,
Very good question!
Okay, so your focus is traffic… Right?
I don’t believe in using article submission services such as the one you mentioned, isnare, etc. I can and should probably write a blog post about this topic but let’s just say for now that I have done tests and that I get more traffic by submitting one article to a site like EzineArticles.com than by using isnare to distribute my article to “thousands of article sites”.
Many marketers focus on quantity… They write one article and submit it to as many article directories as they can. I am not one of them…
The bulk of your traffic will come from search engines and not from article directories. I’ll rather focus on writing an article that’s optimized for the right keywords and gives people a good reason to visit my site. Next, I’ll work on promoting this article (to give it a boost in the search engines) by linking to it from one of my websites, squidoo lens, etc. I’ll also bookmark it using various social bookmarking sites and syndicate it using RSS, etc.
This does not happen in one day and by promoting several articles at the same time using a specific site every week it will only take you a couple of seconds per article.
Trust this answers your question?
Kindest,
Francois