Most of us been there when it comes to duplicate pages. You may have news, articles from news companies that provide you with the news feed. Or you might have your website designed by third party that uses same tools on all their clients' websites.
But did you know that this duplicate content can lower your search engine ranking? It today SEO driven website world it is important to avoid duplicate content as much as possible.
What are duplicate pages for search engines?
It is obvious that duplicate means same as something else. For search engines it means same exact page, same exact title, keywords etc. Search Engines send their spiders, for example Google's spider is called googlebot, Yahoo has yahoo slurp, to crawl your website for content or information. These spiders look for certain information: What is this page about? Is it relevant to your website at all? etc.
If any of these search engines find same content on a different website, it starts to compare the content. First is looks when this content was indexed and from website it was submitted first to search engines. Than it starts to look for links. Are there any links on these pages that point to same source? This way search engine can determine who is the priority website and assigned a higher rank to that site.
But what about rest of the web-sites? What will happen to them? If you have an articles, news that are duplicate content you website will go lower in search engines. It may take some time until search engine actually visits your website and assigns a duplicate content filter. Search engines will simple filter your website out of their search.
What if you pay a licensing fee for these articles!
The only way for search engines such as Google to understand this, is when you e-mail them and explain about your content. You will need to do a re-inclusion request.
What if you like free articles published on different article sites!
No matter what you do, search engine will hit you with duplicate content, however you can teach search engine about your content.
First, reduce number of articles that you have copied. Get some new fresh well written articles. Make sure that majority of your content is your own and rest is articles.
Second, articles must be related to your field. If you write about real estate, make sure you stick with real estate, finance articles only. Show search engines that you have categories and your readers benefit from these articles.
Third, do a re-inclusion request and wait. In few weeks you should see some movement in your site ranking. If it is not improving, reduce the number of articles again.
With free articles is cat and mouse game all over. It is hard to figure out as how algorithm is set in Google for duplicate content as well as how Google deals with re-produced articles that you can freely post anywhere.
What if you have a website that was designed by third company?
Most website companies use same templates or similar templates. That is they give you and rest of their clients same and exact FAQ pages, About Us pages, etc.
You want to avoid this as soon as possible. Always rewrite these articles by yourself. This way you will create unique pages for your website.
Duplicate content is one of the biggest mistakes many webmasters do when it comes to creating websites. Always try to create your own posts and if you really want to expand your article base, make sure you provide a valuable content to your users, not just another article website.
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