There is no greater frustration for an SEO than fighting duplicate content issues the client may not know about.

There are multiple kinds of duplicate content that you may inadvertently have on your website. Find out how to remedy this problem and fix your search engine optimization problems.

1. Article Syndication Republishing articles of online authors is not recommended, and you should have the original content on your website. If you do syndicate content, make sure you get a backlink from the article. You don’t want your original article to be construed by search engines as an attempt to pass off the content as your own, while the other website gets the ranking boost. Always insist websites link to your original document when republishing any content.
2. Content Scraping Blogs may scrape your feed and republish multiple posts without your knowledge. There is often nothing that we can do to stop this, but there is a way to make this work to your benefit. By including multiple links in each blog post, the scrapers will be copying links back to your website. Make sure all blog post links have the full root URL, so any copied content will link back to you.
3. Website Mirroring Make sure you do not have accidental canonical versions of your website, such as www, www1, ., login etc. If an entire website is an exact duplicate of another you will have problems. use the rel=canonical tag and use permanent 301 redirects to remove any duplicate versions. Translating your website is into different languages is an acceptable practice and can help with localized search engine optimization.
4. Quoting Quoting portions of other articles or content is ok, as long as at least 50% of the content is original. It is ok to copy several paragraphs, and using any content beyond this requires an attribution link to the source webpage.
5. E-Commerce Product Pages Shopping carts can create repetitive content for various content types in a shopping catalog. For example a chair vendor may have a large listing of the same office chairs with the exact same title and description. This may be fixed by removing the repetitive descriptions and replacing them with a single product description in the header followed by a listing of the available products. A better solution is to rewrite the description of each product.
6. Multiple Versions Many content management systems and blog publishing systems create multiple versions of content that are available for search engines to index. WordPress creates duplicates in the posts, pages, archives, tags, and categories sections. All but one copy of the should be blocked from search engines using your site’s robots.txt file.

These are common duplicate content problems that cause endless frustration for SEO’s. Do you have any more problems you have faced?  

Thanks for reading our web design and SEO blog. Get the full post online How To Overcome Duplicate Content Problems and Boost Your SEO and tell us your thoughts. Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design - Simple Search Engine Optimization Steps

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Seeding articles, graphs, PDF documents, research, charts, images, videos and quotes to other websites is an excellent way to increase awareness of your website. You will be inserting your brand into a natural source of information and can reach users at a critical point in their decision making process.

When seeding your content the key is to get links back to your site from half a dozen sites. Without this quantity your efforts could be lost.

Doing Content Wrong

1. Find trending keywords
2. Get low paid writers to mashup content and rewrite words
3. Semi automated process – publications still need writers and editors like McDonalds needs cows
4. You may find articles written by Mr. Al Gorithm
5. Machines can’t differentiate between “time flies like an arrow” & “fruit flies like a banana” but some people can overlook this
6. Automated baseball sports writing program exists – developed by Northwestern University. It gets the facts but not meaning of games.

Doing Content Right

1. Create a great article
2. Find trusted, high quality, relevant sites to share it with
   • Ezines
   • Blogs
   • Niche websites
   • Small publications
   • Industry specific websites
3. Share with at least 5 sites and have them all link back to your website. If you only share content with 3 sites there is a chance they will outrank you for it.

Read the official Google policy on cross-site duplication:

If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

With this strategy you will never have to worry about other people stealing your content again, as you will always rank #1 for your work.

Thanks for reading our web design and SEO blog. Get the full post online Sharing Your Work Increases Exposure – Avoiding Duplicate Content Problems Increases Your Rankings and tell us your thoughts. Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design - Simple Search Engine Optimization Steps

Related posts:

1. How To Overcome Duplicate Content Problems and Boost Your SEO
2. No Penalty Claim For Duplicate Content
3. Google Suggestion For Better Rankings: Have Your Content Scraped

So when you prepare content make sure it includes a lot of intra-site links, and even links using your full URL. So instead of linking to /seo you should link to http://www.netpaths.net/seo to have links picked up on other sites. This is also important for your blog, which may likely be read in a 3rd party feed reader.

Im very impressed that Mr. Cutts took such a bold public stance on content scraping, and here are possible meanings:

1. Google is tired of people including them in lawsuits over content scraping. Google is effectively saying there are some (possibly negligble) value to content scraping, so please don’t make us defend ourselves while you sue your competitor.
2. Dulplicate content is such a big problem, Google is waving the white flag and giving up on trying to control blackhat spammers. They are effectively saying: go ahead and scrape, the legitimate sites will always win. Generally this is true, as the authoritative site being copied generally has a higher trust ranking than the copier.
3. Google is trying to appease newspapers (and the AP specifically) and educate them about the web. Any large news event will have thousands of articles written about it, with the majority of the articles being repurposed content. Google is telling the major newspapers and news bureaus that they should not be afraid of having their good content distributed, as they get links back as a reward for sharing and this will help them build their online authority.

Matt Cutts is the webspam god of Google, and what he says goes. He is the head PR person that interacts with search engine optimization firms In person he is a very kind and fair man, someone you would enjoy sitting down to have a beer with and discuss gadgets, code and algorithms. It is essential to listen to everything he says if you want good search engine rankings, and even more important to read between the lines to understand how the search engine functions.

Thanks for reading our web design and SEO blog. Get the full post online Google Suggestion For Better Rankings: Have Your Content Scraped and tell us your thoughts. Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design - Simple Search Engine Optimization Steps

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3. How To Overcome Duplicate Content Problems and Boost Your SEO

Sven of the Search Quality Team post about the underlying concerns detailing how Google handles scraped content.

1. Duplicate content within your domain can be controlled & recommends that you require a link back from the syndicated content site. To make sure your site is identified as the original source, ensure a backlink is present.
2. Cross Domain / Scraped duplicate content – Ensure your site is following all Google guidelines. If scraped content ranks higher than your site, the problem may be a technical issue on your end. check that the content is not blocked by robots.txt, examine your sitemap file & check if the site has any errors or warning flags in Google Webmaster Central.

They post this rather un-assuring paragraph:

When encountering such duplicate content on different sites, we look at various signals to determine which site is the original one, which usually works very well. This also means that you shouldn’t be very concerned about seeing negative effects on your site’s presence on Google if you notice someone scraping your content.

So Google will correctly identify cross domain content problems with a 99% success rate, but the real problem is when the Google algorithm fails.

Graywolf & GWC have more about the search engine’s continues battle with an overflowing array of content.

Thanks for reading our web design and SEO blog. Get the full post online No Penalty Claim For Duplicate Content and tell us your thoughts. Netpaths Guide to SEO & Web Design - Simple Search Engine Optimization Steps

Related posts:

1. How To Overcome Duplicate Content Problems and Boost Your SEO
2. Sharing Your Work Increases Exposure – Avoiding Duplicate Content Problems Increases Your Rankings
3. Google Suggestion For Better Rankings: Have Your Content Scraped