Thoughts on duplicate content...

I was thinking about this duplicate content thing. As of right now, only Google (as far as I know) is doing the "not indexing duped content" thing. Not being indexed is very far from the end of the world. We should all try to lower our reliance on organic SE traffic I think.

That said, SE traffic is no doubt terrific traffic and I certainly don't advocate not making any efforts with it in mind. I figure it should be a part, not the end all in anybody's mind.

So, this article/rant is just my initial thoughts on duplicated content. How I think it's going to affect other webmasters, and our marketing efforts. A technique used by many of us (myself included) is to write an article (such as this one), disperse it all over the net so we get backlinks and gets our link out to where people can get at it, but we post it on our own site so that it helps us make a content rich site (interesting for humans, and a tasty source of "spider food")

Before the anti-duped-content thing, each and every copy of the article was indexed by Google. Good for us as webmasters, not so good for the end users. Imagine that you're searching for something and about 200 of your 400 results are the exact same %^@$ing thing. Frustrating, to say the least. Also unnecessarily taxes the resources of the SEs.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. So, let's take the article scenario. You write an article, and disperse it all around the 'net. Because duplicated content is not indexed by Google, none of the copies will be indexed, and in Googley eyes, the links to your site mean nothing, and do not increase your link popularity. This brings up a couple of points. First not being indexed by Google isn't the end of the world. Last I heard both Yahoo! and MSN were more widely used, and I understand that they are a bit more relaxed about this. While these backlinks mean nothing in Google's eyes, they nonetheless are links to your site across the internet. Last I heard, PR didn't translate as directly into traffic as links translates to traffic.

So, article writing is still a pretty effective way of creating links to your site. Since only one copy of it will be indexed (the first Google finds), write one, post it on your site first, wait several days for it to be indexed and then distribute it.

This brings us to another thing about duplicated content. Affiliate websites. When you join a program and are given a free website, you are given exactly the same site as every other affiliate that has joined that program. Since Google indexes only the first one, and all the rest are considered duplicates, chances are yours will be considered a duplicate. I've heard numbers tossed about as to how much content needs to be original for something to not be considered duped content. It seems that in truth Google is reluctant to publish this exact number (and with good reason, I imagine all that would do is create an environment in which content is duplicated and then changed just enough to hit that benchmark).

So the long and short, change your site, make it yours, it actually is, so treat it that way. And think of how an SE spider views your site. Graphics on a page may be totally original and visually take up a considerable amount of space, but from a code point of view, they comprise a tiny, tiny bit of your actual content.

 

The no duplicate content thing will in one respect, make marketing a website more difficult, in the end I think it will actually wind up being better for all concerned. We won't have a web cluttered with so much duplicated and redundant content, and as a result we won't have the hyper-saturation going on that makes it so difficult to stand out. Not to mention the fact that our potential customers won't be as bombarded and desensitized and will be more apt to turn into "prospective customers" as opposed to simple traffic stats.

Jason Marshall

Webmaster