Duplicate Content’s Effect On My Website?

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Nick Wilson

What Is Duplicate Content

The number one problem that most webmasters encounter is Duplicate Content, whether it’s black hat SEO or mistakes in website optimization, this problem has become one of the biggest on the web. It causes loss of traffic, drops in rank, and a bad user experience. For the most part, many web owners don’t know they are violating Google’s rules, others happen to know it and try to get around it, not that its wrong by any means, but pushing the rules to far can get you flagged.

Duplicate Content: This term describes the unfortunate situation where more than one domain/url has the same or very similar content. This infraction warrants a penalty from search engines whether the user knows it or not.

Ways To Avoid Duplicate Content

Over Promoting: Submitting your article to article submission websites, like Squidoo, Reddit, Ezine, etc. is helpful but to much of this is harmful. A few shares on high profile sites is good for backlinking and traffic, but to much of that can cause a flag for duplicate content. 5 to 10 submission website posts is fine, 50 on the other hand is a little overboard.

On-Site SEO Duplication: This is a fairly common for blogs, forums, article sites, etc. The problem they run into is excessive inner linking. For example; using multiple related posts plugins that all crop the same excerpt, to much of that duplication can cause a red flag and can drop your rank.

Siting Content: If you decide to quote someones content or use a block of their content, there is a way to avoid the red flag. By leaving a link to the original post the spider bot will see both the page and the link back to back. Doing this gives it a natural look and marks it as a reference and not an infraction.

TLD Usage: This stands for Top Level Domains, meaning that your are supposed to use the appropriate domain when it comes to utalizing country specific domains that refer to your content. Here is an example of what not to do; www.example.com/uk or /jp, manipulating url structure to redirect traffic like that is a red flag to Google, so avoiding it is best.

301 Redirecting: If your rebuilding your website on a different domain but you want to use the same content, the easiest and safest way to do this is 301 Redirecting. Through your .htaccess file, you can redirect users, spider-bots, traffic, backlinks, etc. This allows you to by pass the original post and direct the viewer/bot to the new version, this is recommended by Google as being the best form reusing content safely.

Blocking: Try to lead the crawlers toward the post or image you want them to see by properly blocking the duplicate content. If you have an article posted and you have a printer version of that article available, a spider bot will pick up both. The fact that the search engine is able to see the same content in two different places warrants a penalty.
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Nick Wilson is the owner, primary moderator, and main writer for SEO Journalist, which provides daily articles on website SEO and SMO performance. He is an experienced and versatile, professional SEO Consultant and Internet Marketer.