Monday, January 18, 2010

Web Optimization Impact Of Duplicate Content

By Tyson Bradshaw

There are several ways that you can improve your site's page ranking in search engines, the fact is that, not all of them are good. Some people use specific methods in attaining a high page rank in search engines, even if these are regarded to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines - one of these strategies is actually duplicating web content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content in Search engine optimization is actually any web content that is thought to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of deceitful attempts to enhance site's search engine page rankings. Many people think that by creating many but similar replicas of their internet pages or content, that they will be able to enhance their site's page rankings since they will be able to get numerous listings for their site. Since search engines are now supervising these types of trickery, sites using duplicate content can actually end up getting banned from search engine indexes instead of developing their ranking.

What are regarded as duplicate content?

There are a couple of duplicate content types that are being rampantly utilized by many people, each one a bit different in their use, but all of them utilized for the same purpose, which is to trick search engines to get better page rankings.

One way of getting a duplicate content ban is by having very similar websites or identical web pages on various sub-domains or domains that offer basically the same content. This may include landing or door pages aside from the content, so make sure that you stay away from using this if you don't want your site to become susceptible to search engines' duplicate content filter.

Another method of creating duplicate content is by simply taking content from another website or page and reorganizing it to make it appear distinct to its original form, though it is actually the same.

Product descriptions from many ecommerce sites are actually being employed by other sites as well. Other sites simply copy the product description of manufacturer's employed by other competitive markets as well. And add the fact that the product name, as well as the name of artist, manufacturer, writer or creator would be included, a huge amount of content would show up on your page. Although this is much harder to spot, it is still thought to be a duplicate content, or spam.

Distribution of copied articles by other sites other than the one that sent out the original article can also be deemed to be a duplicate content. Unfortunately, although some search engines still deem the site where the original article came from as relevant, some however, do not.

How do search engines filter duplicate content?

Search engines filter for duplicate content by using the same means for analyzing and indexing page ranking for sites, and that is through the use of crawlers or robots. These robots or crawlers go through different websites and catalogues these sites by reading and saving material to their database. Once this is done, these robots then evaluates and compares all the material it has taken from one website to all the others that It has visited by using certain algorithms to determine if the site's content is relevant, and if it can be regarded as a duplicate content or spam.

How to steer clear of duplicate content?

Although you may not have any intentions to try and deceive search engines to boost your site's page ranking, your site might still get flagged as having duplicate content. One way that you can steer clear of this from happening is by checking yourself if there are duplicate contents of your page. Just make sure that you avoid too much resemblances with another page's content for this can still appear as duplicate content to some filters, even if it isn't considered to be a spam.

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