Apr
22

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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7 Responses to “7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content”

  1. Internet Business - Blog Carnival - Edition 12 | Internet Business Opportunities | oibo dot org on May 5th, 2008 4:22 am

    [...] Schmitt presents 7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content posted at Free Website Traffic [...]

  2. ThatsBlog.com » Blog Archive » Blog Carnival: Blogging: Third Edition on May 6th, 2008 8:15 pm

    [...] Schmitt presents 7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content posted at Free Website Traffic [...]

  3. Internet Business Blog Carnival - Edition 13 (SPOOKY) | Internet Business Opportunities | oibo dot org on May 13th, 2008 5:38 am

    [...] Schmitt presents 7 Ways to Deal with Duplicate Content posted at Free Website Traffic [...]

  4. Mark Deaton on December 17th, 2008 7:15 am

    Very nice post. Can you recommend how one would “optimize your internal linking structure” successfully?

    Thanks for such a great post

  5. Kurt Schmitt on December 18th, 2008 2:19 am

    @Mark,

    Thanks. There’s a lot of confusion about internal linking. A discussion on the details really warrants a full page or more. I’ll see if I can work on that and post here when I’ve got something written up based on my own practices. There’s a lot of chatter about using nofollow to sculpt PageRank, but those discussions often fail to include some important details on overall site structure, as well as some very basic and important linking practices.

    Although I recommend using nofollow wisely, there are plenty of sites that don’t have a hint of nofollow that do just fine. Could they do better? Probably, but I’ll save the subject of PageRank sculpting with nofollow for later.

    For now, I’ll tell you that I have some general rules that I follow. One of them is that whenever possible, simpler is better. Simpler is much easier to optimize. Things will get complicated all by themselves, so start out with a simple view of your site, and your linking, and let it grow from there.

    It’s hard to talk about internal linking without talking about keywords and site structure, so let’s do that. In a perfect world, the primary home page keyword would be the most broad. The second tier pages would be linked right off the home page and have narrower keywords, and the third tier pages would be linked off the second tier pages and have the most specific keywords.

    In theory, the broadest keyword has the most competition, and needs the most links in order to accumulate enough PageRank and link reputation to rank well. So, the action step here is that every page on the site links to the home page, using a text link with the anchor text for which you want the home page to rank.

    The next broadest keywords belong to those Tier 2 pages. Again, in theory, these keywords are harder to rank for than the very specific ones that the T3’s are using, but not as difficult as the home page keyword. So, each Tier 3 page links back up to it’s parent Tier 2 page using the keyword for which you want that Tier 2 to rank. So, if you have a very competitive Tier 2 word, you’ll want lots and lots of Tier 3 pages hanging off that Tier 2 so that they can link back with the T2’s primary keyword. Those same pages will also link to the home page with its keyword, effectively binding or “sewing” the site together, if you will.

    You can further sew your site together by interlinking your pages, regardless of site structure, as long as those links are relevant. So, for example, you might have a self improvement site. You have a section of the site devoted to motivation, and a section devoted to self esteem. You would then link various pages on the sub topics of motivation to various pages on the sub topics of self esteem since these are related.

    This cross linking can be done using not only the primary keywords for each page, but also secondary keyword phrases. Within the limits of insanity, the more internal links on a page, the better. All of this will allow the site to gather traffic from the engines for a wide variety of keywords, far better than if you simply create a page and do “downward” linking and just use a navigation bar.

    In addition, you’ll have pages that are more important (like a sales page, or a page that has a high payout for Google Adsense, or a page that is a “must read” for your visitors). You’ll also have pages that are less important in terms of search engine rankings, such as your privacy policy. The action step here is to point more links to the more important pages, and fewer links to the less important pages.

    Here’s a summary of some of my ideas:

    1. Don’t send page rank where you don’t need it.

    2. Make sure every page on your site has at least 2, preferably 3 internal links to it.

    3. Make sure every page links back to the home page, and every T3 links back to its associated T2. This dramatically strengthens the home page and the T2’s since each page will link back with the keywords you want the T2 and the home page to rank for.

    4. Always use the appropriate anchor text with whatever personality you want the target page to inherit. Also keep in mind that on page links with anchor text can help make the page that links TO the other page rank for that term as well. So, highly related pages can be linked together, regardless of site tier structure, in order to form a nice grid where multiple pages get a boost for similar terms. You’ve probably experienced this when your home page or a Tier 2 page ranks higher than a Tier 3 for the specific term.

    5. Make sure that the most important pages have the most links to them.

    I hope that helps. As I said, I’ll try to put together a page on internal linking that explains things a little better. It might take me a while as I have a lot on my plate right now, but it is on the list.

    Thanks for your question,

    -Kurt

  6. Mark on February 3rd, 2010 7:44 am

    Hey Kurt are you for hire?

  7. Kurt Schmitt on February 7th, 2010 3:07 pm

    @Mark,

    I’m considering taking on a limited number of clients, yes.

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