Duplicate Content and SEO

Search Engines like fresh content but hate duplicates. Duplicate content affect badly on your organic SEO campaign

As a webmaster or an online business owner, everyone is running after getting higher and higher page rank and lead the industry especially within organic search results. Acquiring a higher page rank in search engines is not that easy and one has to employ many strategies, techniques and methods to accomplish especially when competition is high. These methods are classified into black hat and the white hat techniques for SEO. Like everyone knows that search engines like the fresh text based content and websites with high quality content often gain high page rank quicker. Sometimes so-called SEO consultants suggest their customers to create multiple copies of the similar pages and some of the intelligent consultants suggest minor changes in page titles and meta keywords. This is considered one of the devious methods for artificially creating content and intending to gain high page rank. Search engines have gone one step further as far this black hat method. They’re continuously monitoring the websites with duplicate content which can ultimately be kicked out of their indexes.

Duplicate Content Filtering

Search bots crawl billions of website and pages on daily basis. They read and save the crawled content in their database. Once it is done, then they pass the content through a series of algorithms and analysis and one of them is content filtering. Just as they analyze your content for relevance and grading a rank in respect to particular keywords, similarly they compare your content with other pages and websites to mark either a fresh unique web copy or just a duplicated content. In case your content is found to be duplicated, they mark it spam and you lose all the score and rank if previous analysis had granted to your website.

Types of Duplicate Content

Well… duplication means duplication and it should not basically be classified in further categories. Although core purpose of duplicating content is the same i.e. to gain higher page rank but based on the usage. Content duplication can be categorized in two classes.

The massive but comparatively ethical way of creating duplicate content is to create mirror sites i.e. to have multiple yet same web pages on other sites or sub domains. This includes doorway or landing pages geared for some specific purposes. Sometimes search engine consultants suggest using landing pages for specific keywords. That’s good for making your PPC or SEM campaigns perform better. But either if you’re an SEM consultant or just a website owner, must not use duplicate content, rather create landing or doorway pages with real fresh content, layout scheme and headings to make your website valuable for search engines and efficiently pass their duplicate content filters.

Another but completely un-ethical way of duplicating content is to copy from other websites and manipulating it to use within your own site or web pages so that it look different from the original source. Search engines are very smart these days and are continuously keeping eyes on most of the malicious activities and strategies adopted to trick their algorithms and efforts artificially gain high page rank. Content duplication is something like poison for SEO and search engines hate it. Just don’t duplicate content rather spend some time to write your own web copy or hire a professional content writer.

Avoiding Duplicate Content for SEO

In order to follow the ethical guidelines for gaining high page rank and achieving a sustainable position within search results of search engines against your targeted keywords, you may not like to trick search and engines to acquire your goals and ultimately get your site marked as spam just because of using duplicate content. So you must make sure that your web copy doesn’t look similar partially or completely with at least any of the visible competitors in search engines.

A better way of avoiding duplicate content is to use free or paid online tools and get your content verified a unique copy. One of them and vastly used is copyspace.com.

BNBuzz.com