Duplicate content

 Duplicate content

In a perfect world there would be only one version of every document but in real life this is not true. A great example is online versions of newspaper sites. In one form or another they all publish exactly or close to the same information about events and facts. This also applies to many other areas, say, recipes, fitness programs, diet programs, definitions, explanations and many others. Search engines can penalize a sites ranking if it looks as though content has been taken from another site. However, these sites do sit in index and even rank very well. How can this be? Does it mean there are no filters? Filters exist, but they are in a primitive form Search Engine’s need lots of resources to check the entire internet. Therefore, engines use simple forms to uncover duplicate content. How? The most common pattern is links. In general engines check between two linked sites for duplicate pages/content. If they exist, then engines try to get rid of the duplicate - usually the one who links to the source site. How does this work? If website B (healthy news) republished an article from site A (health research institute) and puts a link from B to A for reference, search engines understands that site A is the original source and the site B has copied it. Site B is seen as dupe content website. How do search engines penalize? One or two articles like this won’t harm your site much for example, if website B has lots of original content. However, if duplicate content fills a significant number of pages, websites can be penalized by being moved down in the search result pages, moved to supplemental index or even unlisted from search index. Test Conducted Website X has 5 pages of original content and ranked #1 for very uncommon search term. This website has 100+ links pointing to it and Google PageRank of PR4. After few weeks 30 pages of content from another site that required a link back to it were added. In results, after Google indexed the website, it went from #1 position down to about #67 - #100.