Understanding Duplicate Content Filter
Posted July 16, 2010 – 6:53 am in: SEO
The search engines have started to use duplicate content filters and they have been doing cleaning of the web of late. Imposters and those who made duplicate websites with identical content are a worried lot these days, as these filters sieve these websites and they are virtually out of the business. This article is intended to make you aware of the perils of duplicate content, and how to avoid it so that you are not caught by these filters. This will also enlighten you on how you can check if there is any duplicate content on your website, and what steps to take if indeed there is duplicity.
Search engines are doing it in the interest of the net users. They want the content to be clean and relevant to the users. They want to delete the spam, if any on the net. However, because of the imposters, sometimes even good content sites also get deleted, and this is the unfortunate part of the story. In order to be on the safe side, you must first understand how this filter works.
There are many types of duplicate content that get filtered
Sites with identical content: If there are identical pages in your and any other site, your site gets filtered. This spells trouble for the affiliate sites, which contain much material that is almost similar to the parent site.
Scraped content: If you take content from a website, reword it and then try to use it, it is taken as scrap. Actually, it is nothing more than duplicate content. As there are many blogs with similar material, scraping is now a major headache for search engines.
Product details on E- commerce sites: There are many, hundreds of sites selling products. These products being identical, their specifications are also identical. This duplicate material, though genuine, gets deleted by the filters which is a problem.
Same article on many sites: Suppose you have sold an article to a site, and it gets copied and appears on other websites as well, then it is deemed to be duplicate content and gets sieved by the filters.
There are ways to avoid being caught by these filters. There are tools, like our Similar Page Checker, which catch similar pages. Just feed the two URL’s and our software will find the similarity, if any.
If you have doubts that your content has been copied by others. You can use www.copyscape.com. If you enter your URL, in this software, it will find out if that content is there on the net or not. Thus you can create unique content.