I was scanning through some seo forums the other day and found that there are still a lot of people that are concerned with duplicate content. I certainly understand people wondering if there is a duplicate content penalty. Of course the penalty people are concerned with is poor search engine results due to duplicate content. I have discussed this before but I will try to explain it a little better this time.

First we should discuss what duplicate content is. There are two forms of duplicate content you should be aware of. The first of those is what I call ’site to site duplication’. In site to site duplication you have the same article or video posted on multiple sites. One prime example of this type of duplicate content is News.

You can find news headlines on several different sites at the same time and most of those sites are not experiencing any penalties in search results at all. As far as videos are concerned, marketers have known for quite awhile now that to get the best results you should upload them to multiple video sharing sites. So it would seem to me that most site to site duplication causes no known penalties in search results.

The other form of duplicate content is confined to single sites and I call it ‘xml duplication’. This simply means having multiple url’s pointing to the same page in your sitemap. This is mostly a blogging problem due to having a single article listed in several categories. You can avoid this problem by simply changing a few settings on your blog.

I visited one blog where the owner was so paranoid of a duplicate content penalty due to xml duplication that they placed each article into a separate category. You do NOT need to create a new category for every article you publish, just change the way you build your sitemap. I have an article on this site that deals with that titled…How to Kill Duplicate Content.

So now that we know what duplicate content is let’s look at the so called penalty. First realize this…THERE IS NO PENALTY, IT IS A MYTH. If you are simply republishing articles from rss feeds or article directories or even plr articles then hear this…YOUR SITE WILL NOT GET GOOD SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS. If there is a penalty, and there is not, then that is what it is.

The search engines want qualty unique content and sites that provide it are rewarded (earn) good search results. To put it bluntly, you have to do the work to reap the rewards. If you can find your site in the search engines then you have not been penalized for anything. If your site is not getting good search engine rankings then maybe you should learn more about writing great articles.

So to summarize…Duplicate content is found all over the internet and the worst of the two forms is ‘xml duplication’. If you want good search engine rankings you should write and publish your own unique content regularly. Simple enough if have some basic knowledge of the niche your in.

Thanx and remember…Always strive to improve and success will follow
David Knops Jr
DKWebsites LLC

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