The complicated problem of duplicate content and what Google says about it
Being a full-time online marketer means you have to keep a close eye on how Google ranks pages on the web…a very serious concern is the whole duplicate content issue. More importantly, how does duplicate content on your own site and other people’s sites affect your keyword rankings in Google and other search engines?
Now, recently it seems that Google is much more open about how it ranks content. I say “seems” because with Google there are years and years of mistrust in how they treat content and webmasters. Google’s whole “do as I say” attitude leaves a sour taste in most webmasters’ mouths. So much so, that many are more than fed up with Google’s attitude and completely ignore what Google and its experts say.
This is probably very emotionally rewarding, but is it the right path or attitude to follow? Probably not!
Mainly because, regardless of whether you love or hate Google, there is no denying that they are the King of online search and you must follow their rules or leave a lot of serious online income on the table. Now, for my main content/keyword pages, even losing a few spots in the ranking can mean I lose hundreds of dollars in daily commissions, so anything that affects my ranking obviously gets my immediate attention.
So the whole complicated issue of duplicate content has caused me some concern and I’ve made a continual mental note to find out as much as I can about it. I’m mainly concerned about my content ranking lower because search engines think it’s duplicate content and penalize it.
My situation is compounded by the fact that I’m very into article marketing: the same articles appear on hundreds, sometimes thousands of sites all over the web. Naturally, I am concerned that these articles will dilute or lower my ranking instead of achieving their purpose of getting a higher ranking.
I try to vary the anchor text/keyword link in the resource boxes of these articles. I don’t use the same keyword phrase over and over again as I’m almost 99% sure Google has a “keyword usage” quota. , basically removing it from search results. I was there, I did that!
I even like to submit unique articles to certain popular sites so that only that site has the article, thus eliminating the whole problem of duplicate content. This also makes it a great SEO strategy, especially for beginner online marketers, it will take some time for your own site to get to a PR6 or PR7, but you can get your content and links on high authority PR7 or PR8 sites right away. This will bring in quality traffic and help your own site get established.
Another way to combat this problem is by using a 301 redirect so that traffic and page rank flow to the URL I want to rank for. You can also use your Google Webmaster Tool account to show which version of your site you want to rank or feature: with or without “www”.
The whole reason for doing any of this has to do with PageRank juice – you want to pass this ranking juice to the appropriate page or content. This can increase your ranking, especially on Google.
Fortunately, there is the relatively new “canonical tag” that you can use to tell search engines that this is the page/content you want to be displayed or ranked. Simply add this metalink tag to your content that you want to rank or feature, like in the example below:
There are many sides and sides to this whole duplicate thing anyway, so I like to go straight to Google to get my info. Experience has shown me that Google doesn’t always give you the full buck, but for the most part, you can go along with what they say. Lately, over the last year or so, Google seems to have made a major policy change and is giving webmasters a lot more information about how they (Google) rank their index.
So if you’re concerned or interested in learning more about duplicate content and what Google says about it, try these helpful links. The first is a very informative video on the subject titled “Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues” hosted by Greg Grothaus who works for Google.
Another great link is this Google Webmaster Support Answers page by Matt Cutts. It has a lot of useful information, including a video about the canonical link element. Is here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=es&answer=139394
In another post, Matt Cutts discusses the issue of content removal and advises webmasters not to worry about it. This is a slightly different matter, other webmasters and unmentionables can use software to scrape their site and place their content on their site. This has happened to me countless times, even when my content has been reduced to coded nonsense. Cutts says not to worry about this issue, as Google can usually tell the original source of the material. In fact, having links in this duplicate content can help your Google ranking.
“There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to remove every one of them or kick them out of their web host,” says Cutts. “I tend to be the type of person who doesn’t really care about it, because the big, big, big majority of the time, it’s going to be you who shows up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scraping the contents he has a link to you, is linking to you, so at worst, it won’t hurt, but in some rare cases, it might actually help a little.”
As a full time online marketer I am not so easily convinced, mainly I have pressing concerns about my unscrupulous competition using these scrapes and duplicate content to undermine one’s ranking on Google by triggering some keyword spam filter. If this really happens, only Google knows for sure, but it’s just another indication, despite the very detailed and helpful information provided above, duplicate content and the issues surrounding it will continue to present serious concerns to online merchants and consumers. webmasters in the future.