MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Duplicate content is often seen as substantial chunks of content across two or more domains that are identical to each other or noticeably similar. The reason search engines frown upon duplicate content is that when bringing up results it would be best for there to be as many diverse interlinking pieces of content as possible, without having several of the same or obviously similar pages of content popping up in the SERPs.

They are many examples of duplicate content, for example, creating a “mirror” of a site or page by copying it onto different domains to stop any delays when the page is being requested by many users at the same time. Another example of duplicate content is when content is shared between several sources, often through news wire articles. Another person may scrape chunks of content off your site, thereby reproducing content without your permission. There are many other examples of duplicate content, but no matter the reasonmethod, search engines still look at it the same. They don’t want the exact or similar content to appear in their results, as it creates a poor user experience for searchers.

There isn’t much you can do to prevent the scraping of your article, so you need to be the first to claim the content. You need to notify the search engines whenever you add new pages to your site; by doing this your page will be recognised as the original piece of content. You can notify Google by giving them a “Ping” as soon as the content is published. I recommend http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

Duplicate content isn’t when you translate an article from one language to another. For instance Google’s algorithms won’t view the same article written in English and Spanish as duplicate content. And you shouldn’t worry about occasional snippets or quotes being flagged as duplicate content either.

The bottom line is that search engines don’t want the same content to appear in the SERPs more than once, as users only need to read that page of content once. Anything after that is just a hassle and will annoy the people that you’re trying to reach. And I like to think search engines care when we become angry at them.