DupeFree Pro - What Exactly Is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a pretty complex subject so I thought I'd send
you some handy duplicate content tid-bits.

Hopefully these may help clear up any possible confusion you have
regarding how duplicate content is viewed through the eye's of the
Search Engines...


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Code vs. Text Ratio
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Do the Search Engines consider the code of your page when looking
for duplicate content?

For example, if your code is huge and the unique HTML elements on
each new page are small and few, will these pages be flagged as
duplicate?

Fortunately we have discovered that this is not a concern to the
Search Engines. In an interview with Vanessa Fox from Google's
Webmaster Central she clearly mentioned that Google only looks at
the content on your page and is not really interested in the code.


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Navigation Elements vs. Unique Content Ratio
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Navigational and page layout elements (also known as boiler plate
text) usually need to be present on every page of your website.
After all, your visitors need a way to easily navigate your site.

So if your site has a large navigation bar, plenty of header &
footer items with just a small area left for content can this
result in your pages being picked up as duplicates?

According to seomoz.org Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) have been
around for long enough to be familiar with website layout and so
they do recognise that permanent elements on sites are perfectly
normal. They state that the Search Engine's simply pay attention to
the "unique" areas of your pages and usually ignore the rest.


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Licensed Duplicate Content
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If you've obtained licensed content from another online source and
want to make it available to your visitors but avoid duplicate
content problems what should you do?

Simply use the following meta tag in your page html header:

[meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"]

This will instruct the Search engine bot's to ignore the page but
will allow your visitors to view the page and link to it plus the
links on the page itself will also still carry value.


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Duplicate Issues vs. Duplicate Penalties
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With all the talk about hard-hitting duplicate content penalties
vs. lighter duplicate content indexing "issues" where do we stand?

How do we know if we've been heavily penalised for duplicate
content or have simply just had our content de-index or moved to
the supplemental index?

Penalties are usually only imposed on a domain if a fair amount of
abuse has taken place. It does happen though, even on big name
domains.

*Penalties* only really happen if hundreds or thousands of your
pages contain content from other domains and if your domain has
little to no unique content of its own.

Lack of unique content is particularly hazardous for new sites or
sites that have recently changed ownership.

At the end of the day the best thing you can do is just make every
possible attempt to provide your own original content to your
visitors. As a result you should stay clear of any severe penalties
or supplemental index issues.



The issue of duplicate content remains a relatively grey area and
is still widely debated. Either way you stand on the matter, it's
definitely something to be aware of and do your best to prevent.

I hope the above tips were useful to you.


Talk soon,

Michael & Steven Grzywacz
DupeFree Pro