Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
  HTML version available at: http://www.sitepronews.com/archives.html

The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication
By Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. (c) 2007

Repeatedly my sales and consulting staff find themselves
explaining that using duplicate content can and will negatively
affect search engine rankings and it is heartbreaking to see
clients having to rebuild rankings due to such a simple mistake.
As a result, I felt it was time to write this article and
hopefully dispel many misled website owners.

Why write an entire article on something as simple as duplicate
content? Well probably because it is not as simple as it sounds
and many website owners find themselves in the grey area of
duplication; where they don't know for sure whether they are
risking rankings or not.

The following is a sectional breakdown of the most common
duplicate content issues we see defined from the standpoint of a
question – hopefully making this article a little easier to
read. After all, I have no illusions that reading up on
duplicate content rules is exciting.


Duplicate Websites

Definition: a duplicate website is a website that has many if
not all of the same pages as another live website.

Note: the following questions are based on a person who owns two
websites that are duplicates.

Q: "Why is a duplicate website such a bad idea?"

A: The major search engines are constantly trying to improve the
quality of their search engine results in an effort to provide
the best quality content for users. When duplicate content is
indexed by search engine spiders, valuable time and processing
power is wasted. As a result, search engines have blocked sites
that used duplicate content from their database, ultimately
favouring the site that either had the content first, or I
believe, the one site that has the greater online history. In
addition, the major search engines have a bad taste after
dealing with so much duplicate content created by spammers over
the past several years. As a result, posting a duplicate website
is an offense that can quite literally blacklist a domain; there
are few things the search engine properties dislike more than
being gamed by spammers.

Q: "What should I do with my duplicate website then? Just delete
    it?"

A: Deleting the site is the only option unless you want to
create an entirely new website with unique content and a unique
purpose. That said, by deleting the website you can still ensure
the effort you put into promoting the old site does not go to
waste by pointing the domain to your new website's domain using
a 301 redirect. A 301 is a term used to describe a server
protocol which Google and other search engines will 'see' when
they visit the old site. The protocol essentially says that your
content from the old site can be found on the new site and that
this is a permanent forwarding of all traffic. 301 redirects are
by far the best way to minimize your losses from shutting down a
website that just might have traffic or inbound links.

Q: "Which website should I shut down? Is there anything I should
    consider first?"

A: Yes, it is very important that you choose the website that
has the most backlinks and has been online the longest. The
reason I say this is that Google tends to favour entrenched
websites; they have been around a while, are well backlinked and
overall appear to have a positive history.

Whatever your decision is, it is vital you understand switching
a website to a new domain is a dangerous step. This is because
of Google's famed 'sandbox'. The 'sandbox' is really only an
overused turn of phrase that represents a portion of the Google
algorithm which considers the age of the domain as a signifier
of trust. Generally, new websites will require 6 months to a
year before substantial rankings are evident; this is kind of a
right of passage that Google appears to be enforcing on the
average website. Sites that are obviously popular and quickly
gain a load of legitimate link popularity will easily avoid the
sandbox (because Google can not afford to miss a 'great'
website) but this is not the common scenario.

Q: "Will using a 301 redirect pass on the benefit of the deleted
    site's link popularity?"

A: Link popularity is passed onto the other website when a 301
is used but how much this pass-over will benefit the website
seems to fluctuate on a case-by-case basis. Usually the
fluctuation is only present when popularity from one domain is
passed to another with differing content/topic. In this case,
since the link popularity is being redirected to an identical
website I expect the benefit to be virtually lossless.


Duplicate Content

Definition: content appearing within a website that is
duplicated elsewhere on the same website or elsewhere on the
Internet.

Q: "I need content for my website; can I just copy content from
    industry journals and benefit from that quality content?"

A: No, aside from the copyright concerns of using content that
is not yours, your rankings (if they exist) would suffer because
it is highly likely the major search engines would detect the
duplicate content. As a result, the page that you create may get
flagged as duplicated and it would be ignored at the very least.
The page could even devalue your site's overall credibility.
Credibility is a critical component of Google's algorithm so
sites with less credibility tend to have a harder time staying
('sticking' if you will) in a particular ranking.

Q: "I use a content management system to manage my site and it
    uses a particular set of templates. These templates have
    some duplicate content within them and they are spread all
    throughout my website. Should I be worried?"

A: No, in most cases the amount of duplicate content used within
a template in a content management system (CMS) is negligible.
If, however, you have a large number of pages created using a
page where 90% of the text is duplicated and only 10% is unique
you do have a reason to make some changes. In my opinion it is
crucial that every page within a website be composed mostly of
unique content with the exception of catalogues and shopping
carts where text simply has to be reused over and over.

Whatever your situation make certain that your site contains a
large number of pages composed of unique content that has been
well optimized by yourself or your search engine optimizer
(SEO).

Q: "How much of my page should be unique? Is there a standard
    ratio or percentage you can share?"

A: There is no industry standard formula but, if I had to state
a percentage, I would say a minimum of 70% of the page should be
completely unique to thwart any concerns of duplication. You may
be able to get away with less than 70% unique content, but I
would suggest this is playing with fire. Either way, this
statistic is moot since every page you create needs to be
created with the intention to provide a powerful resource; after
all search engines are only a small part of the plan - you do
need visitors to like what they see and buy your product or
service!

Q: "My blog currently has many different ways to find content
    and depending on the route a visitor may find the page is
    actually shown on a different URL (i.e. archives, search by
    label, etc.). In this scenario am I not in danger of a
    duplicate content penalty?"

A: Yes and no. Yes that this is duplicated content but no you
are not likely to be penalized by this simply because a majority
of blogs offer these additional methods of finding content so it
would be detrimental if search engines penalized this
application right now. That said, search engines do have to have
some way to handle this duplicate content. I expect when Google
(picking the most advanced search engine) finds duplicate blog
postings on a website its algorithm chooses the most popular
posting as the primary page to provide in its ranking results.
In other words, the posting URL that has the most number of
inbound links or was spidered first will be the page that
attains rankings.

For those unfamiliar with blogs, the following is an example how
a blog can easily have 3 duplications of a single article. In
this scenario, I recently posted an article on our SEO Blog
(http://news.stepforth.com/blog/) called "SEO Answers #12"
(http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/01/
seo-answers-12-my-couk-domain-lost.php). Upon posting this
article was immediately posted in 3 places: once on the home
page (because it is the latest article), second on its own page
for permanent linking purposes, and third within the label
"Local Search a topic related to this posting.

1) SEO blog home URL: http://news.stepforth.com
2) Permalink URL:
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2007/01/seo-answers-12-my-couk-domain-lost.php
3) "Local Search" label URL:
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/labels/Local%20Search.php

In the future I expect blog systems will offer an option to
specifically add a NO INDEX tag to the top of posts located
within the labelled search section. After all, every additional
label I added to this article created a duplicate version which
is something that I expect search engines will soon either
ignore or require a NO INDEX tag.

Conclusion

I am sure I didn't cover every question regarding duplicate
content, but I am fairly certain I touched on the most common
questions we see at StepForth. If you would like to submit a
duplicate content question or any other SEO question please go
to our submission page (http://news.stepforth.com/questions.shtml)
and I will endeavour to respond as soon as possible; likely in
an article format or SEO blog posting.
================================================================
Ross Dunn is the founder and CEO of StepForth Search Engine
Placement Inc. (http://www.stepforth.com/) Based in Victoria,
BC, Canada, StepForth has provided professional search engine
placement and management services since 1997. Ross is a search
engine optimization and placement expert with over 9 years of
marketing experience and is a Certified Internet Marketing and
Business Strategist (CIMBS).  Blending his experience in the art
of web design and search engine optimization, Ross offers a
unique and informed perspective on obtaining top search engine
placements. Ross can be reached at ross@stepforth.com
================================================================

Copyright © 2007 Jayde Online, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.