Search Engine Optimization All-In-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Dealing with Duplicate Content

In This Chapter

• Understanding duplicate content so you can avoid it

• Recognizing how content can become duplicated

• Resolving duplicate content issues

• Understanding how a federal copyright can protect your Web site

• Handling your content being stolen

In this chapter, you find out how to avoid having duplicate content on your own Web site and why that's important. We also explain how your content can become duplicated (copied) on other Web sites and the variety of causes for it, ranging from accidental to downright malicious. Because you want to protect your original Web site content and prevent duplication as much as possible, we list all of the various sources of duplicate content and give you some recommendations for how to deal with each type of situation.

There aren't many hard and fast rules in search engine optimization (SEO), so when we get to state one, we like to do it with gusto:

Warning

Youmustavoid duplicate content at all times.

Duplicate content refers to text that is repeated on more than one Web page either on your site or on other sites. When a search engine's indexing process (the software that crawls the Web, reading and indexing Web site content into a searchable database) detects that a page on your Web site is a copy of another page on your site or anywhere else on the Internet, the spider tries to make a determination of which page is the original, true version, and it may or may not be accurate. Although there is no penalty for ...