Chapter 5
Dealing with Duplicate Content
In This Chapter
- Understanding duplicate content so that you can avoid it
- Recognizing how content can become duplicated
- Resolving duplicate content issues
- Understanding how a federal copyright can protect your site
- Handling your content
In this chapter, you find out how to avoid having duplicate content on your own website and why that’s important. We also explain how your content can become duplicated (copied) on other websites and the variety of causes for it, ranging from accidental to downright malicious. Because you want to protect your original website content and prevent duplication as much as possible, we list various sources of duplicate content and give you recommendations for how to deal with each type of situation.
Duplicate content refers to text that is repeated on more than one web page either on your site or on other sites. Some duplication is natural and not a problem. For example, if you write about someone’s article, you naturally include quotes from that piece; if you revise your terms of service, you may need to keep both the old and new versions alive on your site; and so forth. But beyond those kinds of minor duplications, you need to vigilantly avoid duplicate content — not only because you want your pages to each provide unique value to users and be competitive in the search engines, but also because too much duplication can get your site filtered out of results or even penalized.
When search engine spiders crawl ...
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