Recently, a couple of my friends attended Portland's Wordcamp. Surprisingly, all of the recaps had a similar tone: the absurdity of some of the bloggers. Apparently, during the "Ask the Experts" session someone actually asked "How do you develop unique content?"Really? This question bothers me for a couple of reasons. My first concern is that there is a blogger out there that does not understand how to blog. The crux of any blog is unique content; anyone having trouble with that basic principle probably shouldn't have a blog. The second problem I have with this question is much more serious. For many new bloggers, there is a temptation to borrow content from other sites. Sometimes this helps the site get a wealth of content and attention soon after launch. While some bloggers take the time to link to the original post within their discussion, this is not always the case. There are a great many sites where content has been liberally borrowed (read: scraped) from another site. In addition, some new bloggers will try to run a few different sites in order to generate some quick income. Invariably, these sites run the same content across multiple domains, otherwise known as duplicate content. What is duplicate content? Duplicate content is simply when a substantial amount of text has been duplicated (or copied) to another page or website. For example, if I were to copy out this post and post it in another blog, that would be duplicate content. In this example, I am a contributing writer on one blog and the owner of another. Technically, I have the rights to my own content and would not be flagrantly committing any crime. However, search engines are not concerned with the legality of content, but rather with the result of content. Today, search engines are built around the concept of information dissemination. In the past, the Web was a wild and free-wheeling experience that was rife with copyright violations; presently, the goal of the search engines determines the behavior of the Web and thus the content within. Because of this, search engines do not look favorably on duplicate content. Duplicate content clutters results pages and degrades the user experience. Imagine a search engine results page (SERP) where a simple search for "safe water bottles" returns the same content for 10 results. In this scenario the user is only given one piece of information, and the search engine has failed to achieve its goal.
"How do you develop unique content?"
Search Engine Marketing : seo
1rosejenifar Monday, November 03, 2008 02:02
You will hear people talk about the "duplicate content penalty." It is not really a penalty,though. If you have duplicate content on your website you won''t be penalized, per se. But the duplicate content won''t benefit you either. That is,it won’t be listed in the search engines. what can you do to avoid the duplicate content issue? * Use articles from article directories * Write all original content * Borrow snippets,not whole pages,and add at least as much original content as you borrow * Add a "noindex" tag on the page with the duplicate conten'' * Ask Google not to crawl pages you don''t want indexed * Stick to print collateral. --------------------------------- rosejenifar Promoter
2Syzlak Thursday, October 02, 2008 13:24
Nice post. Would like to more guidelines about duplicate content over different sites though. Does Google always see content over various domains as duplicate content? Or is it only when there is a pattern?
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