In reviewing a clients new web design this week, I realised the Web development company had actually made the design in a way that could cause Google to un-list the site, and not even be found for the company name!

The principle is all about what is defined as “duplicate content”. Now in many forums there is a lot of mis information about this subject, and can spark a loud debate among experts.

There are 2 sides to this argument

1. On your site duplication
2. Duplicatiopn on the internet as a whole.

Lets cover the first one, as that where my clients main problem is.

Google has stated this:

” Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar”

What Google is meaning where it has been done on purpose to create a lot of similar page aiming at similar keywords, but very little actual change in content or each page.

The problem with my clients site is that the home page has been duplicated exactly. To see what I sent to my Client (Lisa) – Check Out This Short Video

(opens a new window)

Also the internal linking structure is not correct on the site. This is how I help my clients with webdesigners as they don’t keep up with this type of information.
Duplication on the internet as a whole.

This is where your site content (or content you distribute, such as articles or press releases) has been duplicated on a lot of sites.

Here I a couple of points:

1. Control- You cannot control this and Google knows that.

If there was a penalty despicable webmaster owners would copy content 10 thousand times and post it on line on free blogging sites and link the content to you to make your Google rankings drop.

2 . It happens ALL the time – Press releases, articles etc get copied all the time escpecilly if you a news site CNN

What Google does is take more notice of the site which has a higher “Content Importance”

What I mean is if you copied Amazon pages completely, Google is more like to rank Amazon that your pages. Amazon has a higher Content Importance, than your copy of it, and most likely just remove your content from any Google searches, or drop them so low they will never be found. (you become less important)

In the case of an article, it simply means that some links to you from sites which hold articles will count and other versions of the articles won’t be counted- that’s about it.

Many millions in sales has been sold in regard to article spinners, Software programs, that create many article versions with a certain percentage of difference than the original version, but the same content

On the whole, wasted money, and very time consuming programs to to use as well. A better option is to just get new promotional articles produced.

So as a summary, make sure your site is right, and don’t worry to much duplicated content away from your site.

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