Affiliate Tutorials
Avoiding Duplicate Content
On a medium such as the Internet where billions of web pages are indexed uniqueness counts big time. While many of the engines haven't come right out and said that they will penalize you for using copied content they've definitely made a hard push through their PR departments warning against using it.
Google being the largest of the engines has said several times that they strongly advised against using duplicate content and the message holds true to some degree. They advise against it – but in reality how to you completely prevent it? More so, who do you penalize for it? It comes down to having to figure out whose content it really is before you can positively accredit their site for producing unique content and penalize sites which copy them.
Almost an impossibility when you take into account that they index 14,000,000,000 pages.
So what is duplicate content and how does it affect you as a unique article publisher?
Many web masters, myself included, are in the practice of using article spinners and re-writers to provide their low-level Splog sites with some keyword rich text. Such tools take any give article and modify it to give it a unique spin. This is NOT duplicate content. It's also usually not something worthy of reading but that's another story.
Duplicate content is simply when one person copies the work of another directly and uses it on their site. Seems a little unfair? Well it is. More than just taking another person's work it's not really helping the copying web master all that much. Google and the others will see duplicate pages as the same page and there is no sense in listing duplicate pages in the same search results for the same keywords. This eliminates the benefits of having the page online at all.
How to prevent yourself from using duplicate content
This is a vital step, especially when using an outsourced company from services lick Elance and Craigslist. Often writers will just plagiarize another article in an effort to save time and make some easy money. However, if you're paying for a writer – you deserve unique content right?
The absolute best way to determine uniqueness that I've found is by simply using the search engines themselves to see if the article is already indexed. Take a sentence or two quoted and search Google – did you find any results? Try MSN, Yahoo, ASK, and so forth. Still no results? Try another sentence, remember to quote it, and try the engines again.
If you still haven't returned any results odds are that your article's content is unique and wonderful. So now that you've got a unique article – how do you prevent others from copying it?
How to prevent someone from duplicating your content
If you're an article author odds are someone is using your articles in an attempt to benefit themselves. The first step in preventing this is actually finding the abusers.
One of the best free tools online for doing this is call Copyscape, a free copyrights monitoring service. They identify other sites which use the same text content as yours and will display a list of them as well as the percentage of text they are using.
Once identified, the easiest way to get the offending site to remove your text is simply to ask. Not everyone has a full time legal team to handle these types of situations so should the situation arise that they refuse removal, you can always use a very simple cease and desist template.
Of course there is another route, I typically don't ever go the legal road unless absolute theft is proven. Yes it's a shame to have something you've written used on another site, hurting both your uniqueness, but try to spin it to benefit you.
I write offending sites casually letting them know that the article they've used is copyrighted by my company and that if they'd like to use it they need to provide a link to my site. Two out of three times they remove the content rather than give up a link but on occasion they're more than happy to give a link back.
