Monday, October 1, 2007
How Publishers Can Deal With The Rising Challenge Of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content and, particularly, exactly how it is viewed by the major search engines is a hot topic of debate and opinions vary widely. As if this were not enough, the extent of the problem as far as articles is concerned is to a certain extent on whether you are publishing or writing articles. Here in this brief article we are going to examine the problem from the perspective of the publisher.
There is an enormous quantity of duplicate content floating around now and there are clearly occasions when it is appropriate to use it. For instance, if you have a website talking about American history you may decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or perhaps the text of the whole document. Obviously in this case it would be ridiculous to rewrite it to escape any duplicate content penalty.
By the same token, if you come across a well written article that would be of value to your audience you might feel that it is fitting to publish it on your website. Here the writer clearly holds the rights to the article and will normally only allow its use providing it is not altered in any manner and that he is credited for the article by adding his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.
In both of these cases you will clearly be adding a page to your website that is going to be viewed as duplicate content by the search engines and will present you with problems as far as ranking high in the search results is concerned. But does this matter?
Many webmasters now have become obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the true purpose of a website which is to provide a resource for your visitors. If at this point you are expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your website is to make money for you then some re-thinking is needed.
One problem for a lot of webmasters is that while they want to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether you make money or not (putting to one side the issue of their own in-house search advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results depending upon how relevant each page is to the search term entered and whether or not they think that the page is going to give the searcher the information that he requires.
Obviously, if your page is considered relevant and placed highly in the search results you are going to receive traffic and therefore make money and herein lies the key.
Your objective ought to be to build a website that provides valuable content for your audience and that is designed to have them staying on your website and navigating from page to page and will also have them adding your website to their favorites menu and coming back on a regular basis.
To a large extent this means that you need to provide fresh and unique content on a regular basis which you will need to write yourself or outsource to other people to write for you. It is this unique and fresh content that will be indexed by the search engines to provide you with your free search engine traffic. However, there are two other things that you have to consider.
First of all, for your website to have 'authority' and to command the attention of your visitors it will need to provide both width and depth in covering your subject and here referring to and quoting or publishing the work of other people can be extremely helpful.
Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages rather than websites, there is no doubt that they are also evaluating your website as a whole and giving weight to your individual pages to a certain extent on their value as a part of your overall website.
The bottom line is that, while the majority of your website should be made up of fresh and unique content, there is without doubt a part to be played by using well written and relevant articles from other writers wherever these add weight to the overall message that your website is conveying.
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com
By: Donald Saunders
WebMarketingCentre.com provides information on article writing and article submission and is also an article directory where you can pick up a free online article for your website or ezine and to which you can submit articles on a wide variety of topics including articles on cancer and much more.
Google
There is an enormous quantity of duplicate content floating around now and there are clearly occasions when it is appropriate to use it. For instance, if you have a website talking about American history you may decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or perhaps the text of the whole document. Obviously in this case it would be ridiculous to rewrite it to escape any duplicate content penalty.
By the same token, if you come across a well written article that would be of value to your audience you might feel that it is fitting to publish it on your website. Here the writer clearly holds the rights to the article and will normally only allow its use providing it is not altered in any manner and that he is credited for the article by adding his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.
In both of these cases you will clearly be adding a page to your website that is going to be viewed as duplicate content by the search engines and will present you with problems as far as ranking high in the search results is concerned. But does this matter?
Many webmasters now have become obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the true purpose of a website which is to provide a resource for your visitors. If at this point you are expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your website is to make money for you then some re-thinking is needed.
One problem for a lot of webmasters is that while they want to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether you make money or not (putting to one side the issue of their own in-house search advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results depending upon how relevant each page is to the search term entered and whether or not they think that the page is going to give the searcher the information that he requires.
Obviously, if your page is considered relevant and placed highly in the search results you are going to receive traffic and therefore make money and herein lies the key.
Your objective ought to be to build a website that provides valuable content for your audience and that is designed to have them staying on your website and navigating from page to page and will also have them adding your website to their favorites menu and coming back on a regular basis.
To a large extent this means that you need to provide fresh and unique content on a regular basis which you will need to write yourself or outsource to other people to write for you. It is this unique and fresh content that will be indexed by the search engines to provide you with your free search engine traffic. However, there are two other things that you have to consider.
First of all, for your website to have 'authority' and to command the attention of your visitors it will need to provide both width and depth in covering your subject and here referring to and quoting or publishing the work of other people can be extremely helpful.
Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages rather than websites, there is no doubt that they are also evaluating your website as a whole and giving weight to your individual pages to a certain extent on their value as a part of your overall website.
The bottom line is that, while the majority of your website should be made up of fresh and unique content, there is without doubt a part to be played by using well written and relevant articles from other writers wherever these add weight to the overall message that your website is conveying.
Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com
By: Donald Saunders
WebMarketingCentre.com provides information on article writing and article submission and is also an article directory where you can pick up a free online article for your website or ezine and to which you can submit articles on a wide variety of topics including articles on cancer and much more.
// posted by madalinexmud @ 1:54 PM 
