GoogleThere are a lot of articles available on the subject of duplicate content.  Why you may ask?  It boils down to one thing: search engine optimization.  What is so important about SEO?  Without it your website will not show up in the search engine results when someone looks for your search term on the Internet.  When your site does not show up in the search engine results, it will not receive traffic or in this case visitors which will make or break a website.

Duplicate content can be looked at in two ways.  One consideration has to do with the development of a website and the other is in article marketing.  Although article marketing is one of the best ways to get much needed traffic to your website, this article addresses duplicate content in regards to website URL’s.

Helpful Duplicate Content Tips:

•    Avoid making website domains, sub-domains, or web pages with the exact same content.

•    Don’t waste your effort on promoting an affiliate site that is the same as every other affiliate’s site that contains no original content.

According to Google’s Webmaster Tools: “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above (see Google’s Webmaster Tools), we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

Google’s intent is to provide content that contains unique information when responding to search engine queries.  As an example if there are two sites that contain the same article or content, they will only list one of them.  If Google determines that this duplicate content was done with the purpose of trying to gain unfair advantage in page rank or mislead their visitors, they will take action against that site in terms of indexing and ranking that may result in the loss of ranking of the site or the possible complete removal from Google’s index.  Once a site is removed from the index it will no longer be found in the search engine results.

Search engines want to provide their users with a diverse selection from which to choose and in doing so they give  an array of ten different results on a search page.  They do not want to give the same redundant content provided by ten different domains.

They group the duplicate content and then select what they determine is the best “result” offering only one URL from the group.  They draw on various criteria to settle on what is best using such considerations as link popularity.

If your website has multiple pages with almost similar content there are ways to let Google know what your preferred or canonical URL is.  They also give advice on what you can do to proactively deal with duplicate content concern.  Check out their Webmaster Tools for more information.

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