Is Duplicate Content Terror Keeping You Stuck In One Place?

The Google Dublicate Content Squad?

There are so many places online today where internet marketers can publish content, apart from your own website of course, but that raises the question of duplicate content.

Duplicate content is simply having the same piece of information published online in more than one place.  We need to understand how this works because part of any sensible internet marketing strategy should be making use of the huge range of publishing opportunities where you can get your content, your information and your links seen.

Examples of where you might be posting your content include Squidoo, Social Media Sites, Article Directories, Blogs (other peoples), You Tube, Ezine articles, etc.  If you also post this identical content on your own website or blog (and if it's valuable information then shouldn't it be on your own site?) then it is duplicate content.

There is a huge myth that Google will then do something terrible to you and whilst it might not be a great idea they arn't going to come and swipe your Mac for having the front to publish the same thing twice.  But that doesn't mean it's a stunning idea, so how can you overcome it?

1.  Understand that the information is providing content to your site and hide it from the search engines.  This means that it won't contribute to any Search Engine Optimisation effort, but it is providing valuable content for your visitors.

2.  The content you publish on your website needs to be at least 20% different from the stuff you've put out into sites such as  article directories.  This isnt' a rewrite it's more of a reorganisation of certain words and how the information is laid out.  You may find a synonyms dictionary useful to quickly find suitable alternatives to words without having to tax your brain too much.

The way I like to do it (because I rather fancy myself as a writer) is that I take the bare bones of the information and produce purely factual articles for distribution on other sites, but on my own site it has that little bit of my personality included as well.  It's just about the style, and a few anecdotes.  The information is essentially the same, it's just got a bit of fluff around it.

With any business, your knowledge, skills and industry information are arguably your most valuable asset and it is essential you can re purpose, republish and scatter your message far and wide.

Of course this doesn't cover the issue of duplicate content within your own site where google can access the same information through duplicate URL's (make sense? we'll cover this later)  Don't worry because Google has helped out by allowing us to use Canonical URL's and nominate which URL we want to be spotted. What's scary is that this might have happened unwittingly as you've built and linked various pages, but the end result could affect your ranking.

You can check it out here or get us to sort out your site.