| How to avoid being penalized for duplicate content |
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The major search engines filter search results routinely and filter out duplicate content. This is known as "duplicate content penalty". Duplicate content actually means that content is copied from one site and placed on another in verbatim. Copy+paste is a common method of doing this. So how does a search engine think that one website is a legitimate source and another is a duplicate one? Well, search engines retain the content listing from a more popular website, deeming it as authentic and penalizing the other for plagiarism. To enable them to arrive at decisions, they analyse the websites in terms of the number of incoming links the website has, age of the domain, other original content, ranking etc. Sometimes, the actual source may be deemed to be the duplicate content and get penalized unjustly. Search engines have sent a clear message to webmasters. They want original content. So if webmasters want to avoid penalties, they need to follow these guidelines. 1. Use legitimate Redirects In case you are shifting your domain, use permanent 301 redirects. These are legitimate and approved by search engines for routing web traffic. 2. Page Uniqueness If your website has multiple pages, each one must be unique. Even if it has the same theme and design, the content has to be unique and original. 3. Employ Multiple Languages Mind you this only works if you have visitors who know these languages. If you have a bilingual clientele, you can consider multiple domains for different languages. Then you can employ a translator and get your content put up in different languages. This is not considered duplicate content – as each version is unique in its own language as per search engines. 4. Unique Meta Tags Each page must be given its own different meta tag.. 5. Use Robots.txt to direct search engines away Put up a robot txt file on your site to steer the search bot away from your pages if they contain duplicate content. These txt files are useful for keeping search engines away from any content that you consider private. 6. Affiliate Websites or Identical Content If you are using an affiliate program that comes with its own built up website and content, you will need to change and personalize the content so that it does not suffer the duplicate content penalty. This is also the method to be employed if you have put up identical content for some reason. 7. Copyright your web content This is important. Put up a copyright notice, informing visitors and search engines of your commitment to originality. Copyscape is performing a good service for this. 8. Enforce your copyright Use copysentry to enforce your copyright, if you discover that you have been plagiarized. If the plagiarist does not take you seriously, take action. Inform Google and the web host of the offending website of the violation. |