Duplicate Content - How To Beat Duplicate Content Penalties When

Author: Elaine Currie

Duplicate Content - How To Beat Duplicate Content Penalties When Publishing Articles Online
The talk about duplicate content penalties often creates
misunderstanding in the minds of inexperienced webmasters
who end up with the impression that their whole website
will be de-indexed if it contains a phrase to be found
elsewhere online. Some of them get the idea that if their
websites include pages containing other people's articles,
the weight of the penalties imposed on those pages will
drag their whole website down into obscurity. This is not
how the duplicate content penalty works; it's brutal but
not quite that brutal.

One reason why search engines filter duplicate content is
to keep search results free from unhelpful duplication.
Therefore, any web page that has a significant amount of
text that already exists online, will not make it to the
top of search results.

(This avoids the situation where a search would bring up
pages and pages of the same "cookie cutter" websites.) So,
if you write an article and submit it for publishing at 100
online article directories, even though it might show up on
page one of a Google search, the search won't produce a
result consisting of 100 instances of your article (ie one
at each of the web directories where it is posted) in the
first 10 pages. In the case of a recently published
article, it might appear several times in a search result
but, over time, most of the duplicate entries will be
weeded out and moved to the supplemental index (aka "Google
Hell").

In theory the way duplicate content filters work (I say "in
theory" because the system is far from 100% perfect) is
that the website where the article was first posted will be
recognised as the original. So, if you write an article and
want to get your website in the search results and you also
want to distribute your article to article directories, you
need to make sure the search engines know where they saw it
first. The way to do this is to post the article on your
website, wait a few days and then check by doing searches
with the major search engines to see if your page has been
indexed. Once you know the search engines have indexed your
page, you can submit your article to the article
directories.

Make sense so far? Here comes the part that makes the
system less than 100% perfect. Google's filters don't take
the date of first online publication of an article into
account when deciding which website has the best claim to
the article. They use the number of links back to a website
to ascertain the importance of any website carrying the
article. So, if your article is published on a high ranking
article directory, you will most likely find that is what
will appear in a search result while your web page
containing the original of your article has been demoted to
the supplemental index.

Is there a way to get your web pages recognised as being
original? Yes, by having unique content. Is there a way to
rescue your web pages from Google Hell? Yes, the way
things (ie Google's famous secret algorithms) work at the
moment, this can be achieved by building up the number of
links back to your web pages so Google will recognise your
website as being too "important" for Google Hell.

About the Author:

Rescuing your web pages from Google's supplemental index is
not quick or easy. It is far better to avoid ending up
there in the first place. Visit Elaine Currie's Work At
Home Directory website:
http://www.huntingv enus.com/ Articles/ duplicate_ content_penal
ties_secret_ of_beating_ them.html to see how to keep out of
"Google Hell".