Ways Publishers Can Deal With The Rising Difficulty Of Duplicate Content

By Author: Donald Saunders
Total Articles: 84
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The use of duplicate content and, particularly, precisely how it is seen by the search engines is causes heated debate and there are a wide range of opinions on the subject. As if this is not enough in itself, the size of the problem when it comes to article marketing is to some extent on whether you are writing or publishing articles. Here in this short article we are going to look at the problem from the publisher's perspective.

There is a massive quantity of duplicate content about now and there are obviously occasions when it is correct to use it. For instance, if you have a website dealing with American history you could decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or perhaps the contents of the whole document. Clearly in this case it would be ridiculous to rewrite it in order to avoid any duplicate content penalty.

By the same token, if you discover an article that would be of value to your audience you may feel that it is appropriate to publish it on your website. Here the writer obviously owns the rights to the article and will generally only allow it to be used ...
... providing it is not edited in any manner and that he is given credit for your use of the article by adding his 'about the author' paragraph at the end of the article.

In both cases you will obviously be adding a page to your website that will be seen by the search engines as duplicate content and will present you with difficulties . But is this really important?

Many webmasters now have become obsessed with getting good search engine rankings and have lost sight of the true purpose of a website which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. If at this point you are expecting me to say that the objective of your website is to make you money then you will need to do some re-thinking.

A common problem for the majority of webmasters is that while they wish to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether or not you make money (setting aside the subject of their own advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results based upon how relevant each page is to the search term used and whether or not they think that the page will give the searcher the information that he requires.

Naturally, if your own page is considered relevant and placed high in the search results you are going to receive traffic and thus make money and it is here that the key is to be found.

Your aim should be to construct a website that provides valuable content for your audience and that is going to keep them on your website and navigating their way from page to page and is also going to have them adding your website to their favorites menu and coming back regularly.

To a large extent this means that you have to provide unique and fresh content on a regular basis which you will need to write yourself or hire others to write for you. It is these fresh and unique pages that will be indexed by the search engines to provide you with your free search engine traffic. But, there are two additional things that you will have to take into consideration.

First of all, for your website to have 'authority' and to retain your visitors' attention it will need to provide both width and depth in covering your subject and here referring to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be extremely helpful.

Second, though search engines rank pages rather than websites, there is no doubt that they also evaluate your website as a whole and give weight to your individual site pages to some degree on their value as part of your overall website.

The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your website needs to be made up of unique and fresh content, there is clearly a role to be played by including well written and relevant articles from other writers when these add weight to the overall message that your website is putting across.