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Apr

7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content

Filed Under duplicate content, website optimization, website traffic

In my post The 9 Myths of Duplicate Content, I addressed some of the confusion and conflicting beliefs I’ve seen expressed by a number of website owners surrounding this topic. I’ll start this post with a quick recap of the main issue, and then I’ll get right into several solutions to dealing with this beast, known as the “dupe monster.”

This issue is closely related to website optimization in a number of ways. What we want to do here is focus on website optimization as it relates to duplicate content, both on your site, and syndicated content that you’re publishing elsewhere.

The main issue is one of substantially similar content on two or more web pages. Those pages can both be on your site or one may be on your site and the other on another site. In either case, your site may suffer a duplicate content penalty. The result? Lower organic search rankings and less website traffic.

This may be made worse if:

Your site’s content is not properly optimized.
Your internal linking is not properly optimized.
Your inbound links are not properly optimized.
Your site is in a highly competitive niche.
Powerful sites are republishing this duplicate content (this can have both good and bad ramifications, depending upon whether or not they are linking to you in an optimized way).

Effectively Dealing with Duplicate Content

1. Don’t publish content on your site that is substantially similar to content that you publish or distribute for publishing elsewhere. If you have a page on your site, and you want to distribute that information as an article, then rewrite the content so that it is substantially different. In addition, my testing has shown that submitting substantially different content to each article directory is much more powerful than submitting the same article to every directory.

Even if you do publish duplicate content, however, you can still rank high in Google by following the rest of these steps…

2. Don’t publish content (of any significant size) on your site that is substantially similar to content elsewhere on your site. But if you must…

3. Use the meta robots tag with “noindex” to prevent the search engines from indexing a page that is substantially similar to another page on your site. Better yet, do what Google suggests. Create one page with the content and then link to it from other pages. That way, you can index everything and not be penalized as well.

4. Add additional content to any potential duplicate content page and optimize that page for your keywords. For example, many article writers don’t know how to optimize for keywords. If you’re using someone else’s article, then create an introduction paragraph, a conclusion, and perhaps just a rambling comment on the same page as the article.

It’s often much easier to comment on someone else’s material than it is to write your own from scratch. In this way, it’s not that difficult to turn a 300 word article into a 450 word article and hopefully, make the content different enough so as not to incur a penalty.

5. Optimize your content for the keywords for which you wish to rank on all of your pages, whether duplicate content or not. This is a no-brainer, but many people do not do this.

6. Optimize your internal linking structure for the keywords for which you wish to rank, use no follow where appropriate so that you don’t bleed Page Rank, and point at least three internal links to every page on your site. Point more links to the most important pages.

7. Use a targeted, keyword optimized, systematic external linking campaign to create a substantial number of inpointing links to your site. One of the best ways to do that is to use article marketing. You create useful content for your site and for distribution via the article directories, and then enhance that with social media sites.

If possible, do not publish duplicate content. In cases where circumstances warrant that you do, doing the above will remove weaknesses that many sites have, and therefore make your site stronger. The intention is to make it strong enough to withstand any scrutiny from Google and come out on top, even if you do publish duplicate content.

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