Duplicate content and, particularly, precisely how it is viewed by the major search engines is causes heated debate and there are a wide range of opinions. As if this debate is not enough, the scope of the problem as far as articles is concerned is to some extent on whether you are a writer or publisher. In this brief article we are going to examine the problem from the publisher's perspective.



There is an incredible amount of duplicate content floating around today and there are clearly occasions when it is appropriate to make use of it. For instance, if you have a site dealing with American history you could decide to provide your visitors with details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or perhaps the contents of the entire document. Clearly here it would be out of the question to attempt to rewrite it in order to avoid any duplicate content penalty.

By the same token, if you come across a well written article that would be of value to your audience then you might well feel that it is appropriate to publish it on your site. Here the writer clearly owns the copyright to the article and will normally only permit its use providing it is not changed in any way and that he is credited for your use of the article by including his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.

In both cases you will clearly be adding a page to your site that will be viewed as duplicate content by the search engines and will present you with problems . But does this matter?

A large number of webmasters today have become obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the real purpose of a site which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. If at this point you are expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your site is to make money for you then some re-thinking is required.

A common problem for a lot of webmasters is that while they wish to use their site to make money the search engines could not care less whether you make money or not (putting on one side the issue of their own in-house search advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results according to how relevant a page is to the search term entered and whether or not they feel that the page will provide the searcher with the information required.

Of course, if your own page is considered relevant and placed highly in the search results you are going to receive traffic and therefore make money and it is here that the key is to be found.

Your objective must be to build a site that provides valuable content for your audience and that will have them staying on your site and navigating from page to page and is also going to have them book marking the site and returning regularly.

To a large extent this means that you need to provide unique and fresh pages regularly which you will need to write yourself or hire others to write for you. It is this fresh and unique content that will be picked up and indexed by the search engines to provide you with free search engine traffic. But, there are two additional things that you must think about.

First of all, for your site to have 'authority' and to retain the attention of your visitors it will need to provide both depth and width in covering your subject and it is here that referring to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be extremely helpful.

Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages rather than sites, there is no doubt that they also evaluate your site as a whole and give weight to individual pages to some degree on their value as part of your overall site.

The bottom line therefore is that, while the greater part of your site has to be composed of unique and fresh content, there is without doubt a role to be played by including relevant and well written articles from other writers where these add weight to the overall message which your site is conveying.