Website Promotion 101: Dealing with Duplicate Content Issues

Monday, 4th February 2013 - SEO, Website Promotion 101

It is very obvious that search engine nowadays are very smart and they only want fresh, unique and quality content sites. Having quality content attracts search engine bots to crawl your site and include it in the top search engine results. However, this is only part of the whole SEO strategy. One may also consider other stuff like web structure design, on-page optimisation, proper use of description tags and alt tags for images and more. Ensuring a duplicate-free content will help your site maintain and improve its visibility among search engines. Website Promotion recommends some of the following tips to avoid the harm effects of having duplicate contents to your site.

  1. It is hardly recommended not to steal content from other sites. Aside from being suspected for malicious duplicate content, you might be charged of copyright infringement from the original creator of the content. If you think the whole content is exactly what you need, try to alter each paragraph and run copyscape or any alternative originality checker to check its authenticity percentage.  There are some free originality software online where you can check the authenticity of your write-ups and web contents.
  2. Your site might be growing so fast that you didn’t realise you are repeating same content for your other pages. Check across each pages of your site and if you found same content, alter the pages to make it unique from the rest.
  3. Beware of content scrapers. If you found someone stole your content, you can send report to DMCA infringement request with Google, Yahoo and MSN. To check if someone stole your content, you can use a free tool copyscape and it will reveal the copies for your page on the internet.
  4. If you are publishing articles on your site, be sure that each articles posted has undergone originality check. Be sure to publish articles related to each categories or niches. Your site might outrank in search engines if you put contents in a wrong niche.
  5. If you ran several websites and used these sites to promote something using identical content, be sure to tell Google which one you prefer to be indexed. To do this, set-up Google Webmaster Tools, choose Optimisation, select Remove URLs and specify the URL you want Google not to index. This will help in keeping your site free from banning in search engines. On the other hand, you can also use sitemap to do exclusions of some URLs from search engine index. More information is available in Google Webmaster Tools.
  6. If your site is offering affiliate program, that is if you are accepting business listings for your site, be sure not to copy the exact description from the original site. It is recommended to rephrase or rewrite the description before publishing to your site.

The above mentioned tips were just some of the major things you must consider when creating web contents. For more information visit Website Promotion Search Engine Optimisation or Like Us On Facebook to receive Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing Tips. You may also call 1300 663 664 for more details.