If you are a site owner then should you be using other peoples' articles on your site and just how do you go about avoiding duplicate content penalties from the major search engines?
The use of duplicate content and, especially, precisely how it is viewed by the major search engines is being hotly debated and there are a wide range of opinions. As if this is not enough, the extent of the problem when it comes to article marketing depends to a certain extent on whether you are a publisher or writer. In this brief article we are going to discuss the problem from the perspective of the publisher.
There is a huge amount of duplicate content floating about today and there are obviously times when it is right to use it. For instance, if you have a website dealing with American history you could decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or even the contents of the entire document. Obviously here it would be inappropriate to say the least to rewrite it in order to escape a duplicate content penalty.
At the same time, if you come across an article which would be of value to your audience then you might well feel that it is right to put it on your website. In this case the writer obviously holds the copyright to the article and will normally only permit its use providing it is not edited in any manner and that he is given credit for your use of the article by including his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.
In both of these cases you will obviously be adding a page to your website which will be viewed by the search engines as duplicate content and is going to present you with problems as far as ranking well in the search results is concerned. But does this matter?
A large number of webmasters today have become obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the real purpose of a website which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. If at this juncture you were expecting me to say that the prime purpose of your website is to make you money then you will have to do some re-thinking.
One problem for most webmasters is that while they want to use their website to make money the search engines are not in the slightest bit interested in whether you make money or not (setting aside the subject of their own advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in the search results based upon how relevant a page is to the search term used and whether or not they judge that the page will provide the searcher with the information which he wants.
Naturally, if your own page is considered relevant and placed highly in the search results you are going to get traffic and thus make money and it is here that the key is to be found.
Your objective should be to build a website which provides valuable content for your audience and which is going to keep them on your website and navigating their way from page to page and is also going to have them adding your website to their favorites menu and coming back frequently.
To a large extent this means that you need to add fresh and unique content regularly which you will have to write yourself or hire others to write for you. It is this fresh and unique content which will be indexed by the search engines to provide you with your free search engine traffic. However, there are two other things which you have to think about.
First, for your website to have 'authority' and to hold the attention of your visitors it will have to provide both depth and width in covering your subject and it is here that making reference to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be extremely helpful.
Second, despite the fact that search engines rank pages and not websites, there is little doubt that they also evaluate your website as a whole and give credit to your individual pages to a certain extent on their value as part of your overall website.
The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your website should be composed of fresh and unique content, there is without question a role to be played by including relevant and well written articles from other writers where these add weight to the message which your website is carrying.
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