Role Of Duplicate Content In Search Engine Optimization

Webmasters continuously ask a question about the role of duplicate content on their website. Their concern is how search engines deal duplicate content. Here are some useful ways to determine content duplication on your site and then how to avoid this problem and finally how to resolve this problem. No doubt some sites on internet continuously reprint content of other sites which can be harmful for owner of that content as search engines are very good at identifying the origin of specific content.

How To Check If you have duplicate content on your site

Article rewriting has become big curse for any site. Some article reproducers use automated content creation softwares to produce new versions of content but time has proved those softwares are not too good to produce a sensible content. Anyways thieves are reproducing content which normally remains 80% same and gets into search engines with the name of another site that causes fragmentation risk for the rank of original site. To find out whether your content has been stolen by some one else you just copy some of your article portion and paste it into Google with quotes. Google should show that text in bold version against your site only and if it shows some other sites as well, they have copied your text on their sites.

If you are in the first place with that text then penalty for duplicate content will go to later sites and if you are not in on top with that text then you will be penalized for duplication. Although you own the text but you site indexing was slower than your thief.

How to manage this issue

Content privacy has almost become impossible. Many organizations are striving to protect content of webmasters but it has been useless till now. Simplest solution for webmasters in this regard is to make sitemaps and let search engines know about your sitemaps. This helps search engines to crawl your site on regular basis therefore chances of any other website indexing before you minimizes.

Content Duplication On same site

Some sites could have potential versions of their content. It can be due to different formats of pages like html and PDF. In this case solution is very simple. Webmasters can select a default format of their content and disallow all other formats in robots.txt file. This disallows search engines to crawl those pages while visitors still have reach to those pages. In case of URLS, webmasters can use nofollow attribute on their site to ensure urls of duplicate versions are excluded from sitemaps as well.