More and more webmasters are building
websites with publicly available content (data feeds,
news feeds, articles). This results in websites with
duplicate content on the Internet. In cases of websites
build on news feeds or data feeds you can even find
websites that match each other 100% (except for the
design). Several copies of the same content in a search
engine does not really do any good and so Google apparently
decided to weed out some of this duplicate content to
be able to deliver cleaner and better search results.
Plain copies of websites were hit hardest. If a webmaster
was publishing the exact same content on more than one
domain, all domains in question were eventually removed
from Google's index. Many websites based on affiliate
programs suddenly took a big hit in loss of traffic
from Google.com. Shortly after this started some webmaster
forums saw the same complaints and stories again and
again. They put together a clear picture of the situation:
a duplicate content filter was applied.
Duplicate content is not always bad and will always
exist in one way or the other. News websites are the
best example of duplicate content. Nobody expects those
to be dropped from Google's index.
So, how can webmasters avoid the duplicate content filter?
There are quite a few things webmasters can do when
using duplicate content of any sort and still create
unique pages and content from it. Let's see some of
these options explained here.
1) Unique content on pages with duplicate content
On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique
content should be added. I do not mean like just a few
different words or a link/navigation menu. If you (the
webmaster) can add 15% - 30% unique content to pages
where you display duplicate content the overall ratio
of duplicate content compared to the overall content
of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of
having a page flagged as duplicate content.
2) Randomization of content
Ever seen those 'Quote of the Day' thingies on some
websites? It adds a random quote of the day to a page
at any given time. Every time you come back the page
will look different. Those scripts can be used for many
more things than just displaying a quote of the day
with just a few code changes. With some creativity a
webmaster can use such a script to create the impression
pages are always updated and always different. This
can be a great tool to prevent Google to apply the duplicate
content filter.
3) Unique content
Yes, unique content is still king. But sometimes you
just cannot work around using duplicate content at all.
That is alright. But how about adding unique content
to your website, too. If the overall ratio of unique
content and duplicate content is well-balanced chances
that the duplicate content filter applies to your website
are much lower. I personally recommend that a website
has at least 30% of unique content to offer (I admit
- I am sometimes having difficulties myself to reach
that level but I try).
Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google's
index? I don't know. To be most successful a website
should be completely unique. Unique content is what
draws visitors to a website. Everything else can be
found somewhere else, too and visitors have no reason
to just visit one particular website if they can get
the same thing somewhere else.
About The Author: Christoph Puetz - is a successful Entrepreneur and
international book author.
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