You and your web hosting provider have the shared goal of getting people to your site.

How To Dodge The ‘Duplicate Content Police’

You and your web hosting provider have the shared goal of getting people to your site and making sure they have a hassle-free experience when they get there. You spend a lot of time calculating the most effective ways to optimize your search engine results. When a search engine returns multiple results that are either identical to or very, very similar to each other, it can be very frustrating for the reader. Search engines understand that getting such similar results is annoying so most have tweaked their process to filter very similar pages so that searchers get a range of results that are relevant, but still different enough to be helpful. The trick is to find the “happy medium” that keeps your site optimized but doesn’t result in an annoying array of identical results.   

Search engines have duplicate content filters that “crawl” a website, read the pages and store the information in a data base. The “filter” then compares its findings to other information in its database. Depending on a few factors (such as the overall relevancy score of a website) the filter than determines which are duplicate content and filters out the pages or the websites that qualify as spam. The down side to this is that your pages may be deemed “spam” by the filters, even if they are not spam.

The duplicate content filters first emerged when people began setting up mirrored domains without any variation on multiple domains to increase visibility. This dubious method actually worked until the search engines began de-listing one of the duplicate sites. (In most cases it was the older domain that stayed in the index and the newer mirrored site was de-listed.)

Work with your web host to make sure nothing in your SEO results can be considered spam. One way to prevent your ecommerce site from being labeled as spam is to write original descriptions of products. Manufacturers typically give all of their distributors exactly the same product descriptions which means that those identical phrases end up on numerous sites. Many online merchants use catalogs that are copied straight from the manufacturers’ descriptions and specifications. Copying product catalogs word for word can create a bad user experience because most people read paper catalogs differently than they read online catalogs. It can also hinder your ranking efforts and may provoke a search engine filter. If you use a catalog in this manner be sure to change the product names, description content and text layout so that it appears unique to your store users and search engines.

While writing your own copy can be cumbersome and time consuming, especially if you have a lot of products, it will vastly limit the number of “duplicate copy” findings of the filter. At the very least you should modify the content so that it is not exactly the same as the content on your competitors’ sites. If it’s a product description, simply adding customer ratings or reviews could add enough unique content on your page to “beat” the filter.

If you use distributed articles on your site, make sure the articles are relevant to your overall web page and also to the site as a whole. Make changes in the articles as needed to make the copy more meaningful to those who visit your site. The few minutes you spend improving content can make all the difference to your readers and to your profits.  

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