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amberstar702
06-05-2007, 07:47 PM
Why you need unique content for your website:




Exclusive Video: If you optimize your site with respect to the search engine industry, I'm sure you are aware of the specter of duplicate content. Even accidentally repeated content can cause ranking issues, something we are all trying to avoid.

At the Seattle SMX Conference, our own Mike McDonald caught with Google engineer extraordinaire Matt Cutts to discuss this very issue. Cutts himself acknowledges duplicate content is an interesting dilemma even for Google to tackle, something he indicates while discussing the concept of content reclamation:

"You always have to worry about how it can be spammed. What if someone innocent doesn't claim their content and then and smart spammer comes along and claims everybody else's content... That's a tricky thing."

The second session from the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle was focused on the issue of duplicate content.

Eytan Seidman, Lead Program Manager, Live Search, Microsoft said you should be concerned with duplicate content on your site because it fragments your pages in some way. In order to avoid duplicate content, he said to keep session parameters simple.

For local sites he recommended having unique content on them and if you don't have different content, you most likely don't need multiple pages. To avoid people copying your content, he said to tell people that are going to use your content to attribute.

Peter Linsley, Senior Product Manager for Search, at Ask.com gave a standard definition of duplicate content saying it was the same content on multiple urls. The reason it is bad for search engines is because users do not want to see the same content result.

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As for avoiding duplicate content you should use copyright or creative commons notice. Also make the content unique and difficult to be taken out of context.

Amit Kumar, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo Search, said that Yahoo tries to crawl links from duplicate, less; so fewer visits from the crawler could mean that the content may be considered duplicated. He added if you get content from somewhere else you should attribute.

Vanessa Fox, Google, Product Manager weighed in on duplicate content saying they want to show unique information so they want to avoid duplicated information.

If you have pages that are fairly similar, you may want to consider combining the two. In some cases, pages that are similar just need to be distinguished from one another a bit more.

On client site redirects, she said a 301 is considered a client side redirect because the client is actually taken from one page to another and the crawler can see the message.

On search engines reaching out to Word Press and blog software types to avoid duplicate content, she said there is a lot they can do as far as working with the CMS software people to come up with better solutions so end users won't have to worry about duplicate content.

Article by Mike Sachoff, who writes about ebusiness for WebProNews.

athand
01-15-2008, 01:14 AM
Yes, unfortunatelly this is correct what you say.
For one year I have started an experiment with two of my new real estate site.
For the first one I wrote 10 different articles and have posted them on 10 different sites. All 10 articles was recognised from google and yahoo as valid links.
For the seccond site I have written 1 article and have posted it to more than 200 sites - and guess what - 0 (zero) links!

So - avoid duplicate contant!

BRITT REED
01-16-2008, 03:21 PM
great read.....

LOTrainer
01-16-2008, 07:29 PM
I have been doing quite a bit of research on the subject of duplicate content from various forums, etc. I have been told by a lot of these people that there is actually a penalty from Google if duplicate content is found? How valid is that?

DMike
01-16-2008, 09:34 PM
LOTrainer, i'm not sure if that's true, but it would make sense for google to penalize those who duplicate content("steal content") in it's attempt to provide good quality sites in their searches. As we know, they already did that with the people who had "hidden text"(by different ways, meaning it was not visible to users, it was there just for SEO purpouses) on their sites

Greg
01-17-2008, 06:55 AM
They don't penalize duplicate content because they might end up penalizing the person who originally wrote the content instead of the person who stole it.

When they find duplicate content they send one copy into cyber oblivion and the other copy is used in the serps.

marcosll
01-17-2008, 08:41 AM
For Real Estate websites we have 2 main problems with duplicate content.

The first one is MLS systems with many websites. You write one property description and it's displayed on many websites. Well which site will rank for that content?


Similar or duplicate property descriptions within your own website. In my case, we have some properties with the same description. For convenience if we had multiple apartments in the same building we wrote similar or same descriptions. An error, I know, but it did happen. Obviously google decides which page to list and only lists one if any of the duped property pages.

DMike
01-17-2008, 08:59 AM
I've read articles where both sites were penalized, i'm not sure if both of them were penalized the same, but that's what it said there(as you said Greg, google couldn't know which one originally wrote the content). marcosll, what you're saying is right about similar content. There are many sites which display the same info, but you won't see many urls which will display the same info, exactly in the same way( titles, description, keywords, ... are different so the content it's not exactly the same on the page)

reinman
02-08-2008, 11:29 AM
Great read! I too have been hearing a lot about duplicate content but wonder to what extent it really matters. The net is full of dup content so how can the SE's really untangle it all? I like the example of dup real estate listings. Also what if the meta tags are different? How much does that count for not being duplicate?

doogers
02-10-2008, 03:51 AM
athand...did your website that you submitted 200 of the same article get penilized, or was it just that it didn't rank as well? I assume you don't have that same article posted on your website.

iamsudhi
02-10-2008, 07:16 AM
I think search engines still need to develop a good algorithm to filter out duplicate contents. Many webmasters submit same articles in different article directories to get multiple backlinks. I have also done similar things. I have posted same article in almost 40 different article directories and for that I have got more than 20 backlinks from those sites.

Not only that when I searched in Google with the topic of my article it returned pages containing the same article from 4 different article directories.

I really do not have any idea that submitting same article in multiple directories is ethical or not but this is very common activity for webmasters to gain page rank.

tina.anderson
02-21-2008, 08:59 AM
This is one thing Google needs to improve on. If you are caught though, they will penalize you for having duplicate content and you will get hammered in the rankings.

ExtraArm
03-12-2008, 12:19 PM
Site owners are rarely penalized for duplicate content.

Unfortunately though, PageRank is still one of the biggest signals Google use to tell duplicate content from the original.

One fix is to always include an absolute URL within an article that points back to your domain, preferably to the article itself. That way, even if a spammer scrapes your site, you get a backlink to the original article.

flatfeemls
03-20-2008, 10:53 PM
I do not think its impact is as quick as you guys do.

Wikkipedia and answers.com are the same site with duplicate content, and so are RSS and sydicated sites. So the danger is in duplicating something over and over again.

Say selling a web site that is the same over and over again like adwords made content sites.

Dan Rafter
04-02-2008, 05:04 PM
Hi, All:

This is an interesting discussion. I think that it's best, though, to have original, localized content on your Web sites and blogs. That, to me, is what brings readers back. And if these readers see that you are providing relevant and informative content about your market, I think they're more likely to become customers.

Dan
BlogProRealty.com

rainier
06-02-2008, 02:39 AM
Every sites or Blogs needs a unique contents to be easily crawl by the spiderweb as we all know that google updates from time to time plus the danger of duplicate content is it might harm our site or penalize by google.

thepong
08-17-2008, 10:48 PM
I'm newbie for SEO, This thread is an interesting discussion.

Copybuild
08-22-2008, 12:18 AM
If there are two sites with the same content, Google will recognize the original one by looking on their page rank. It's their basis to separate spammers from the original writer.

Codythebest
08-22-2008, 06:46 AM
Duplicate content and same structured sites are definitely penalized by Google.
While I started my site the exact same time than a colleague in my office, I could do it myself with my code and he had to buy a site from point2agent.
For the same keyphrase, I'm #5 in G and he's in the 90's, and we were focused on that very same keyphrase...
If you go with a site from point2agent or advanced access and other, there is no way to show high in Google. The more personalized site, the better...

inkslinger
09-02-2008, 04:45 AM
I totally believe in duplicate content penalty.

I have tried it, not with my site though. I used Blogger (blogspot) to post PLR articles.

We all know that PLR articles are articles that are sold to N number of people. PLR Sellers say that we can post their articles as is, even without modifying it and there would be no duplicate content penalty because no such thing exists. But that's a bull.

What blogger did to my two sites? They informed me that my blogs had been marked by their admin as spam! They will put the site down after 20 days. This happened just after posting 5 articles. Imagine, just five articles and they thought my blogs were spam already.

Well, I guess there are indeed spam. Why? Because I've been posting contents that have been already existing elsewhere.

Bottomline, duplicate content penalty does exist. And moral of the story, don't post anything on your site that you've already posted elsewhere.