How Publishers Can Deal With The Growing Problem Of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content and, particularly, precisely how it is viewed by the major search engines is being hotly debated and opinions vary widely. As if this is not enough in itself, the scope of the problem as far as articles is concerned depends to a certain extent on whether you are publishing or writing articles. In this short article we are going to consider the problem from the perspective of the publisher.

There is a huge amount of duplicate content around nowadays and there are obviously occasions when it is correct to use it. For instance, if you have a website dealing with American history you could decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or possibly the text of the entire document. Obviously here it would be inappropriate to say the least to rewrite it to escape any duplicate content penalty.

At the same time, if you come across an article which would be of value to your audience you might well feel that it is fitting to put it on your website. In this case the writer obviously holds the copyright to the article and will normally only allow its use as long as it is not altered in any manner and that he is credited for your use of the article by adding his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.

In both cases you will obviously be adding a page to your website which is going to be viewed by the search engines as duplicate content and will present you with problems . But is this important?

Many website owners nowadays are obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have lost sight of the real purpose of a website which is to provide a resource for your visitors. Now, if at this point you were expecting me to say that the central objective of your website is to make money for you then you will have to do some re-thinking.

One problem for most website owners is that while they want to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether or not you make money (setting aside the subject of their own in-house search advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in the search results according to how relevant each page is to the search term entered and whether they consider that the page is going to provide the searcher with the information which he wants.

Obviously, if your own page is considered relevant and placed high in the search results you are going to receive traffic and thus make money and herein lies the key.

Your aim should be to construct a website which provides valuable content for your audience and which is going to have them staying on your website and navigating their way from page to page and will also have them book marking the website and returning regularly.

To a large extent this means that you have to add unique and fresh pages regularly which you will have to write yourself or outsource to others to write for you. It is these unique and fresh pages which will be picked up by the search engines and indexed to provide you with your free search engine traffic. But, there are two other things which you need to consider.

First of all, for your website to have 'authority' and to retain your visitors' attention it will have to provide both width and depth in covering your subject and it is here that referring to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be invaluable.

Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages and not websites, there is little doubt that they are also evaluating your website as a whole and giving credit to your individual site pages to a certain extent on their value as a part of your overall website.

The bottom line is that, while most of your website should be made up of unique and fresh content, there is unquestionably a role to be played by incorporating well written and relevant articles from other writers when these add weight to the overall message which your website is carrying.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.com

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