You can ask questions or add your comments at the ‘Insights to Search for Business’ Blog.

Duplicate Content and your Website

A well known observation within the SEO community is that Google penalizes websites with content that is duplicated on another website. People spamming Google have used duplicate sites as a way to influence search engine results. Google has a massive database of web pages and so the ability to find pages that are duplicated exists.

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If you can be banned or penalized for duplicate content you should avoid it. You should write all your own content. Therefore you know it is unique. Also search engines love fresh content when they are indexing so the more often you can replace or add to this content the better.

If you have unique content on your site what can you do to protect this investment in time and effort? It seems to be a common fact of today’s internet that there are site owners who take the easy route when it comes to content and copy and paste it straight into their own site. This is often done through ignorance.

To check on duplicate content you can use a very useful free site www.copyscape.com. Copyscape makes it easy to search for duplicates of your site’s content. If there are sites out there that have copied your content it will be listed using Copyscape. We do a regular check for duplicate content and unfortunately often find that people have duplicated it.

What can you do if you find that a site has duplicated your content? You can write to the site owner or webmaster informing them and asking them to remove your content. Also mention in your email that you will report the matter to Google under their Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) guidelines.

If there is no response and your content is still showing as duplicated in Copyscape you should report the issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html

At the end of this process you may still want to change your version of the duplicated text. This way your content is fresh, unique and hopefully even better than the original. It is also wise to continually review your site for duplicated copy on Copyscape.

James Peggie is the director of marketing for Elixir Systems a full service search engine marketing company.

You can comment on this article at the Elixir Systems Search Blog.

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