Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

Fact: Google penalizes page rank when it determines that content is duplicated by other sites.

If your rankings have slipped then it's possible that your page contents have been duplicated causing a duplicate content penalty. Google doesn't want multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages so they will devalue all but one of the copies of the content based on the age of the page.

Don't Let Other People Benefit From Your Hard Work

Writing good quality content for your site is hard work! If someone has not paid you for your work (either with money or with a reciprocal link or other agreed payment) it is stolen!
Checking For Duplicate Content

It is a chore to check for duplicated content but luckily someone has come to the rescue - www.copyscape.com. Just by entering the URL of the page you want to check, Copyscape will return a list of pages in the Google index that contain text also present on your site, or for more detail you can subscribe to their Copysentry service.

No one knows how much duplication can result in a penalty, if it's 10 words, 20, a paragraph or a whole page. You will need to make a decision on whether you believe you have a problem. A lot of time your marketing text will appear as a description for a link to your site - this probably won't be counted as duplicate content. If your site's position in the search engines has recently plummeted then duplicate content might be the cause or if a competitor is found for text or an article you wrote then you may also have an issue.

What To Do With Duplicate Content?

If you are hosting someone else's content and you're seeing duplicate content put a 'robots' meta tag in the head section to stop the search engine spiders indexing that page. If you're tempted to modify the content then you will need to get the original author's permission. A much better option would be to take the central idea of the article and write a completely new article using your own text.

If you're concerned that someone has duplicated your content, write to the website owner who has published your content requesting they remove the offending text, you can mention that you will report the matter to Google under their DMCA guidelines.

If the email does not elicit a response or your content is still visible then report the duplicate content issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html

If all else fails, change your copy of the duplicated text. Keeping your copy fresh is essential so make the best of a bad situation and write even better copy.

Tips To Ensure You Avoid Duplicated Content :

* Put a copyright notice on the bottom of the page and warn that you check for duplicated content.
* If you have multiple domains that point to the same site content take advantage of permanent redirection. (301 status report) This informs the spider of the redirection so they understand you are not putting up duplicate content.
* When you have an article to get republished on other sites send them in a text format. (Articles are a great way to quality incoming links by the way!) This ensures that when the article is republished it will be reformatted and viewed by the search spiders as original.
By: James Peggie and Dylan Downhill