Web Worx

SEO duplicate content problems affect many a website. You have probably realized that you may submit your website to the search engines, but one or more pages may not show up in the results. If you have experienced this problem, there are many reasons for that. The first thing that you must understand is that search engines do not like similar content or content that is almost similar. More than two websites may produce similar content by coincident or purpose. As the search engine crawls the pages, it may encounter similar content at one location or the other.

When duplicate content from many websites is parsed, the search engine will screen pages that are going to be shown in the results, and pages that will be ignored. Many pages may be available at the time of producing results, so only the ones that are selected will show up in the results. That is why it’s important to write unique content. Unique content will not encounter duplicate issues.

Another reason for duplicate content problems is lack of indexing by the search engines. Duplicate content is more likely to be rejected for indexing. The whole site or some pages of the site may be rejected. If your website or collection of websites has many duplicate pages, the search engines will filter some of the pages. This means that even if you have more than one website under different domain names, you must avoid duplicating content from one of your websites. Each of your websites must have unique content.

You can avoid duplicate content by writing different articles altogether, or you can re-write your content in a different way while maintaining the same meaning. When the search engines parse your pages, it will recognize them as different. Duplicating content is a waste of time after all. What is the use of running a website with missing pages? A missing page is a sure factor that turns away visitors, and thus reducing traffic to your website. Duplicate content is like spam. So try to avoid it, even if you are using the content on your websites.

Search engines do not like duplicate content for the following reasons: If there are multiple pages with the same content, then the search engine results will lack variety. As a result, the same pages will not be shown on the search results. Imagine entering a keyword in the search engine and coming up with ten pages on the results page with the same content. If search engines could allow that, then they would be as good as useless. More like the Wild West.

Search engines also do not like duplicate content because there are costs involved in displaying similar content. Indexing pages several pages with similar content is a waste of resources. Why index ten pages with similar content when only one can do?

In order to avoid duplicate content, you must know the situations where duplicate content exists. Search engines identify certain patterns and pointers that may suggest duplicate content. As a result, the indexing software will decide whether to select or reject certain pages. The software will jump certain pages and if your website contains duplicate content, it will be affected. The following are five reasons for the cause of duplicate content issues:

Search engines will detect duplicate content when there is a reproduction of content from another site. Content reproduction is often seen on affiliates, agents and distributor’s websites. These websites often sell products and services from producers. The producer’s website may distribute content to the promoters. Content in the form of data feeds, catalogues, articles and other marketing material is usually distributed to affiliates. The number of distributors may range from ten to over a thousand. Imagine the amount of content that will be distributed in the process, all over the net. Over a thousand affiliates may be selling the same product from one producer. Most producers want have specific requirements for promotion material, therefore they may prescribe product descriptions to be used by all affiliates. This means that affiliates are not allowed to re-write or change the descriptions.

The second cause of duplicate content issues is printer formatting. Print formatting allows websites to produce similar content on alternative pages. To avoid duplicate content indexing issues, meta tags (nonindex) must be used on the web pages. Tags prevent web pages from being indexed as duplicate pages.

The use of RSS feeds is another cause of duplicate content issues. Websites that use RSS feeds on their pages in the form of html code are likely to be indexed for duplicate content. The best way of avoiding duplicate content problems with RSS feeds, is to use java script. Java script cannot be recognized by search engines, therefore RSS content in the form of JavaScript is much safer.

Urls, which are displayed in many ways, are likely to be indexed for duplicate content issues. Some websites display the same page under different urls. This is called “Canonicalization”. Search engines may not show some of the pages.

There are many webmasters who write and give articles for free, as long as the users agree to link back to the webmaster’s site. Such articles may be given to many people, and they will use the same article on their websites. When this happens, your article will be filtered for duplicate content, and only the original article is going to be shown.