Nobody likes to have their work copied, but inevitably it does happen to most websites at some point in their life. Unique content is an important key to any websites success in search engine listings. The reason behind this is the search engine uses content to determine how important the site is to its subject and decide on its ranking.

Given these facts, if exactly the same content (or very similar) is present on another website in the search engine index, both sites get penalised for it. For this reason it is important to monitor content that has been indexed by Google and other search engines for duplicate content. It is worth mentioning that even if your site wrote the content first, and another site has stolen it, get it removed! QUICKLY! The foundation of your rankings could rely on keeping your content unique, so as soon as you spot duplicate content, remove it and replace it with something else unique. Your ranking can be lost quickly, and can be very difficult to recover.

There are some tools on the web you can use to find this duplicate content. Nobody would expect you to crawl the millions of websites on the web for content you didn’t know existed – this is what http://www.copyscape.com is for. Enter each URL from your site, and Copyscape will tell you if the page has duplicate content and what it is by highlighting it.

Duplicate content doesn’t just apply to outside your website, it also applies inside too. Don’t duplicate content on multiple pages, as you will lose authority on those pages. Repeating yourself just makes the site look spam-ridden, and Google hates these with a passion.

You also have to check your Meta tags for duplicates as well. Google Webmaster Tools has a handy HTML Suggestion feature which will show you which pages have duplicate Meta tags on them. This will allow you to go in and quickly change them to something unique. Most importantly, this should apply especially to title tags as this is the text your visitors will see when they search for you!

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