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 issue of duplicate content. More importantly, how does having duplicate content on your own site and other people’s sites affect your keyword ranking on Google and the other search engines?
Now, recently, Google seems to be a lot more open about how it ranks content. I say “it seems” because with Google there are years and years of mistrust when it comes to how they treat content and webmasters. Google’s “do what I say” attitude leaves a sour taste in the mouths of most webmasters. So much so, that many have had more than enough of Google’s attitude and completely ignore what Google and its experts say.
This is probably very emotionally satisfying, but is it the right path or attitude to take? Probably not!
Mainly because regardless of whether you love or hate Google, there is no denying that they are the king of online searches and you have to follow their rules or leave a lot of significant online income on the table. Now for my top keyword content / pages, even a loss of a few places in the rankings 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 problem of duplicate content has caused me some concern and I have made a constant mental note to find out as much as I can about it. Mainly I am concerned that my content will rank lower because search engines think it is duplicate content and penalize it.
My situation is compounded by the fact that I am very interested in article marketing – the same articles appear on hundreds, sometimes thousands of sites on the web. Naturally, I am concerned that these articles will dilute or lower my ranking rather than achieve their purpose of getting higher rankings.
I am trying 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 as I’m almost 99% sure that Google has a “keyword usage” quota. Repeat the same keyword phrase too often and your highly linked content will drop by 50 or 60 places. , basically removing it from the search results. I’ve been there, done 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 for a great SEO strategy, especially for beginner online marketers, your own site will take some time to reach a PR6 or PR7, but you can place your content and links on high authority PR7 or PR8 sites right away. . This will bring in quality traffic and help your own site establish itself.
Another way I fight this problem is by using a 301 redirect to get traffic and pagerank to 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 highlight: with or without “www”.
The whole reason to do any of this has to do with the PageRank juice – you want to pass this ranking juice to the appropriate page or content. This can raise 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 appear or rank for. Just add this meta link tag to your content that you want to rank or highlight, like in the example shown below:
Anyway, this whole duplicate problem has many faces and sides, so I like to go straight to Google to get my information. Experience has shown me that Google doesn’t always give you full money, but for the most part, you can follow 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 finding out more about duplicate content and what Google is saying about it, give these helpful links a try. The first is a very informative video on the topic titled “Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues”, presented by Greg Grothaus, who works for Google.
Another great link is this page from Google Webmasters Support Answers by Matt Cutts. It has a lot of useful information, including a video on 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 content scraping issue and advises webmasters not to worry about it. This is a slightly different matter, other webmasters and nameless may use software to scratch your site and place your content on their site. This has happened to me countless times, even when my content has been reduced to scrambled nonsense. Cutts says not to worry about this matter, as Google can usually tell the original source of the material. In fact, having links in this duplicate content can help your ranking on Google.
“There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down and try to remove each and every one of them or remove them from their web server,” says Cutts. “I tend to be the type of person who doesn’t really care about it, because the great, great, great majority of the time, it will be you who appears, not the scraper. The content that links to you, he is linking to. you, so worst-case scenario, it won’t hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a bit. “
As a full time online marketer, I am not so easily convinced, mainly I have pressing concerns about my unscrupulous competition using these drafts and duplicate content to undermine one’s ranking in Google by activating some keyword spam filter. If this actually happens, only Google knows for sure, but it is just another indication, despite the very detailed and useful information provided above, duplicate content, and the issues surrounding it, they will still present serious concerns for marketers in online and webmasters in the future.