Duplicate Content Is Harmful For Search Engine

[amitesh]

‘Content is King.’ This is not only a popular phrase but very true indeed. Content is the integral part of every website. It helps in providing relevant information about the company, its services, and vision & objectives. For online businesses having an aim to spread their operations globally, a well-written web page with a proper selection of keywords is mandatory. However, the fear of duplicate content may destroy your dreams of attaining top pages ranking in search engines.

It is difficult to define if your content is fresh and not copied from anywhere. You never know if a competitor of yours is copying your content and reducing your credibility in the virtual world.

Duplicate content has several negative consequences. Google can penalize your website and thus, your search engine rankings will be affected. A downgrade in ranking leads to supplementary results in which Google may choose to show your competitor in its SERP.

[Tom Lindstrom]

As long as the content you write and publish on your site is original,everything is fine.You cannot be punished if someone steals your content and publishes it on their site.If I have understood correctly, search engines look at where the content was published first.

If someone knows better, please comment on this.

[torka]

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty on Google. They will NOT downgrade your rankings because of duplicate content.

Watch this Vanessa Fox interview (back when she was still a Google employee) for more information about (among other things) what they do have: a duplicate content filter. Very different animal from a penalty.

You can use CopyScape to check for stolen content. Another method is to simply search for a unique sentence or two from each of your articles.

If your website content has been stolen, that's a copyright issue. You can send the thief a cease & desist letter demanding they take down the content. You can file a DMCA request with their ISP to have the content (or even their entire website) taken down. And you can file DMCA notices with the SE's. They have been known to remove individual pages and even entire sites from their index if the content on the page was stolen.

--Torka

[viper_one]

there is so much to be said about content duplication, copy...copy...copy etc. (have fun!)

[Limozine]

I agree with the previous posters. Duplicate content will not hurt your site, but it won't help it either. The first site to get the content indexed is the one that benefits from original content.

One way to be sure to get your content indexed first is to update it regularly. If you rarely change your content, the search engines may wait days or weeks to crawl your site. In the meantime, someone else could possibly copy it.

[TradeShowGuru]

Originally Posted by Tom Lindstrom

As long as the content you write and publish on your site is original,everything is fine.You cannot be punished if someone steals your content and publishes it on their site.If I have understood correctly, search engines look at where the content was published first.

If someone knows better, please comment on this.

It's true. But also, having content on other sites that you also have on your site is totally fine. I have all my articles on my site, but they're also published at various article sites as well.

I actually ran into a problem with this on eZine articles as well. because I published an article on our IncBiznet blog (which I don't have my own account for, I use my co-workers) Ezine searched for the original content and saw that it was originally published under my co-workers name and the article was re-jected.

Sarah

[Denise]

Sarah, I can understand why that would be frustrating for you, but it sounds like Ezine articles was doing what they were supposed to, i.e. taking reasonable steps to ensure their contributors had exclusive ownership of the articles they submit.

Were you able to straighten it out with Ezine articles?

[urvi88]

Ya.. I agree that duplicate content will give negative effect to your site.

[carlar9]

You can't help duplicate content. I own several online pet boutiques and you can't help but have duplicate content in the product description. Does this hurt your store ranking or is that just true of blogs and articles?

[bizcard]

I've been reading about duplicate contents lately and it does not hurt your page rank nor does google penalize you for it.

The thing with Ezinearticles is you have to submit your articles there first. I happened to get an email from Ezine that 1 or 2 of my articles maybe a duplicate or attributed to someone else. I checked the site they claim where the duplicate content came from my Scribd account. what I did was edit my article on scribd and put my name on it. Problem solved with Ezine.