By Bob Speyer, President, Web Success Team

Duplicate content is pervasive on the web. It’s so easy to take someone’s article or text and place it on your website or blog. “Everybody does it, so why shouldn’t I?” There are a great many reasons why you shouldn’t and this article will address them and make a good case for putting in the extra effort and develop original content. I will also discuss how you can eliminate duplicate content and therefore improve your search engine rankings and visibility.

How Search Engine Spiders Find Duplicated Content?
Duplicate content is when the search engine spiders detect content that has the same correlation and scoring with two or more web pages. They detect “edit distance,” in which the spiders determine how many changes are made to make it look like another document. Another determinant is they first identify and then eliminate items such as Nav Bars, Footers and Headers before comparing the documents in question. On a larger scale, they sort documents in similar categories and compare those groups to detect the duplications.

Detecting and Eliminating Duplicate Content on Your Website
If sites are determined to run duplicate content, then those questionable pages are barred from the search engine results pages (SERPs) and they will not appear in a search. However, there are tools that can help you identify the offending content in a website and help you restore the page in the SERPs.

Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help to identify Duplicate Content within a Website and assist in restoring the Webpage in the SERPs. Select a tool that will identify the exact correlation between a multiple number of documents and between your website pages; and not ones that just compare two pages. Once you make the corrective changes, run the tool again to see the results.

Of course there are things you shouldn’t do, such as: not writing content that is placed in a common area and shared (like the Header, Navigation and Footer). Also avoid changing words to their synonyms, like car and automobile or switching word order. And make sure you have enough content on each page, the less content the greater possibility of duplication detection.

Be Original, It Pays Off
Play it straight. If you develop content that is original you will greatly benefit. For starters, you position yourself as an authority on your subject matter. You site will get better rankings and hence more visibility. You will attract more authority links or inbound links that also help with search engine ranking. If you don’t have the time to write content consider hiring a ghostwriter. You can do the research and give them the direction. And remember to add content to your website at least once a week. And anything your write should have your keywords embedded for search. Take the time, it will pay off and you won’t have to worry about not being searched. Remember the spiders aren’t human and do not hold grudges. They simply go tirelessly around the clock searching for ways to knock you down on the rankings. Don’t give them the satisfaction, be original!

The Web Success Team

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