Released on = June 18, 2007 5:07 pm

Press Release Author =

Industry =


Press Release Summary = Advertisers, Webmasters: you may be responsible for losing your business if you do
not consider the effect of duplicate content web sites.

Be aware, or put your revenues at risk.

Press Release Body = New Orleans, LA June 20, 2007

Webmasters beware! If you are running duplicate web sites with the same content you
are doing yourself more harm than good.

And it\'s not just your web site. It\'s your blogs, articles, advertising content
(including banner ads and text ads) and stories too.

A blog with your original content - an online, frequently updated journal - keeping
up with what\'s new and interesting can be of great value to your business or
constituency.

Unfortunately webmasters are using blogs to earn a quick buck. They don\'t know what
they\'re losing. On the internet \"Content is King\". Everyone\'s heard it, but few
know what it really means.

If your search engine marketing strategy includes duplicate content, whether on a
web site, blog or as paid advertising on other sites you\'d better think again.

Your original, unique content is one of the major factors in your web site revenue.
It may seem the distribution (sometimes syndication) of your site content will help
get the word out. It may - but be careful.

Your content and other sites\' desire to link to it is what got you the search engine
presence you have. If you allow your content to be duplicated, you only cheapen the
original and in the worst cases may give up your good standing altogether

Google, the preeminent search engine specifically devalues duplicate content in web
site ranking. A duplicate web site may appear in ranking but that doesn\'t mean that
it will stay there. And if it does, watch out, this doesn\'t bode well for the
original.

It is better to keep you web site content unique. Chasing PageRank and link
popularity is a fruitless effort. Many webmasters (and search engine marketers too)
make this mistake. PageRank and Search Engine Rankings are not necessarily
connected.

This topic is so hot, that last week, at SMX Advanced the panel presented a
\"Duplicate Content Summit\".

The audience had a many questions related to duplicate content and web sites.
Included below are the Questions and Answers from the Google Webmaster Central
Team.

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-at-smx.htm
[Google Webmaster Center Blog]

Duplicate Content Summit at SMX Advanced (Questions and Answers Discussed)

Q: If I nofollow a substantial number of my internal links to reduce duplicate
content issues, will this raise a red flag with the search engines?

Answer: The number of nofollow links on a site won\'t raise any red flags, but that
is probably not the best method of blocking the search engines from crawling
duplicate pages, as other sites may link to those pages. A better method may be to
block pages you don\'t want crawled with a robots.txt file.

Q: Are the search engines continuing the Sitemaps alliance?

Answer: We launched sitemaps.org in November of last year and have continued to meet
regularly since then. In April, we added the ability for you to let us know about
your Sitemap in your robots.txt file. We plan to continue to work together on
initiatives such as this to make the lives of webmasters easier.

Q: Many pages on my site primarily consist of graphs. Although the graphs are
different on each page, how can I ensure that search engines don\'t see these pages
as duplicate since they don\'t read images?

Answer: To ensure that search engines see these pages as unique, include unique text
on each page (for instance, a different title, caption, and description for each
graph) and include unique alt text for each image. (For instance, rather than use
alt=\"graph\", use something like alt=\"graph that shows Willow\'s evil trending over
time\".

Q: I\'ve syndicated my content to many affiliates and now some of those sites are
ranking for this content rather than my site. What can I do?

Answer: If you\'ve freely distributed your content, you may need to enhance and
expand the content on your site to make it unique.

Q: As a searcher, I want to see duplicates in search results. Can you add this as an
option?

Answer: We\'ve found that most searchers prefer not to have duplicate results. The
audience member in particular commented that she may not want to get information
from one site and would like other choices, but for that case, other sites will
likely not have identical information and therefore will show up in the results.
Bear in mind that you can add the \"&filter=0\" parameter to the end of a Google web
search URL to see additional results which might be similar.

Paraphrased from the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Duplicate content web sites create a problem for webmasters because they force
search engines to select which pages are important and which aren\'t.

Even the mighty search engines have limited resources. If they decide wrongly which
content is authoritative they may focus their energies on the duplicate and not the
original: your valuable unique content.

Duplicate content refers to blocks of content within or across domains that either
completely match other content or are significantly similar. Google wants to show
unique content and has to choose which version to show. This means that that if
your site has a \"regular\" and \"printer\" version of each article, for instance, and
neither of these is blocked in robots.txt or with a noindex meta tag, Google and the
other engines will choose which one to show searchers.

Furthermore, if Google thinks the duplicate content is there as an attempt to
manipulate rankings they may \"make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and
ranking of the sites involved\". Google implies that your web site or whole network
of web sites can be penalized with low search engine rankings or removed from their
index.

Are you willing to take this risk and allow your content to appear on shadow web
sites?

We welcome your comments - to learn more about this phenomenon please visit:

http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog/