Duplicate content is a plague for webmasters. Scrapers copy our own content right back at us, and years ago they used to sometimes rank higher than we did! Webmasters have a ton of questions about this stuff. SEOMoz has done a good job laying it all out in this rather amusingly illustrated guide to dupe content.
Key points:
- Google puts what it believes to be the “dupe” content into supplemental pages so it won’t rank as high as the original.
- What if a scraper is stealing your content? As long as they’re ranking below you, don’t worry – it’s just not worth it. But if you’re new and/or they’re a powerful site, this could squeeze you out. Fortunately, you have some options: “One option is to file a DMCA infringement request with Google, with Yahoo!, and with MSN. The other is to file legal suit (or threaten such) against the website in question.”
- Having some duplicate content shouldn’t hurt your domain. If you have a lot of it, however, you may want to consider putting meta tags on the dupe pages to keep robots from following. That way, you avoid potential penalties.
Related posts:
- To www or not to www: avoid the dupe penalty!
- Why Quality Content is Key For Search Engines
- Google Sandbox – does the new patent lay it all out?
- No-follow, Wikipedia and Spam
- Google Web Scraper
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