While many websites and online resources refer to a duplicate content penalty,
it’s more accurate to look on it as being a duplicate content filter. The term
penalty implies that a page has some form of penalty or deduction applied,
but in reality it is filtered out of the listings. Accurately, a page with
duplicate content will not gain the same benefits as a page filled with unique
content. Regardless of the semantics, though, duplicate content is a consideration
of every SEO campaign and avoiding it is strongly advised.

What The Search Engines Think

In the eyes of the search engines, and especially Google, duplicate content
is a page that contains substantial passages of text that are found elsewhere
on the Internet. This allows for some level of quoting, referencing, and even
copying some page content (legitimately, of course) but prevents the indexing
of duplicate pages. The reason behind the duplicate content filter is to try
and prevent spam sites from gaining the advantage in search engine results.

Accidents Do Happen

Unfortunately, while the filter is established to prevent spam pages from
benefiting, it may also have a detrimental effect on genuine pages. For instance,
affiliate sites that legitimately use product descriptions and reviews from
their affiliate program are likely to fall into the trap. Using articles and
other content submissions that are offered for fee use by writers and other
websites may all fall foul of the filter.

Following Best SEO Practices

Good SEO practices, such as building links to a page and using unique titles
and meta tags, can only be of so much benefit in dragging a duplicate page
into the search results. There comes a time when every site needs to consider
the addition of fresh, unique, SEO content for any pages that are struggling.
Adding unique content is good SEO practice under any conditions and the duplicate
content filter is one of the major reasons why.

The Original Content Page

Search engines attempt to determine the original source of the information,
offer this its deserved ranking, and then apply the filter to any duplicates
of that page. Mistakes do occur in this process though and some pages that
were first to publish a particular piece of content have been filtered out
the results. Reports are found on the Internet from Webmasters and SEO services
claiming their pages have dropped from the results because another site copied
their content.

Other Benefits Of Unique Content

As well as being an important factor in SEO, original content enables you
to target traffic more accurately. It is also more appealing for those visitors
that have already navigate around similar sites. For the affiliate marketer,
unique content can help create a niche, target very specific groups of people,
and carve a niche into the product you are promoting.

Adding Unique Content To Your SEO To Do List

One of the earlier steps in an SEO campaign is the writing or acquiring of
good quality, unique SEO content. By ensuring the content is unique you can
also ensure that all of your web pages can perform as well as possible once
your SEO efforts begin to bear fruit. Be wary of publishing your own content
on syndication and publication sites because this can surprisingly have the
same effect as copying another site’s work.

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