Duplicate content is a serious problem. It can hurt your search engine ranking pretty bad. The search engines abhor duplicate content and penalize websites with duplicate content. This is the search engines’ way of protecting the search results that they present to their users. As much as possible, the search engines would want to present unique results for a given search term.

How can you avoid duplicate content issues? How should you manage your content to avoid triggering the red flag from the search engines? Here are effective strategies to beat the threats of duplicate content:

  • Put out original content.

When adding content to your website, make sure it is original. You can write the content yourself or you can hire a content writer to write for you. Always make sure that you are the authority of the information that you are providing and no other websites is sporting that same content. If there is a need to get some content from other website, always acknowledge the source. This is to avoid issued of replicating content.

  • Article Marketing And Duplicate Content

If you are using article marketing as part of your website promotion, make sure that the articles you submit to the article directories are not duplicates of what you have on your website. You can tweak the article a bit before submitting it to the article directories. Another technique is to publish the article in your website first then wait until Google bot has crawled on the content before you submit it.

  • Mirror Site

A mirror site refers to a website with an exact content to another website. This is a serious case of duplicate content. To avoid arising any issue from having a mirror site, use a 301 redirect for every page. Mirror site is sometimes inevitable especially when you have just revamped your website but will be using the same content as your old website. Aside from 301 redirect, you can also opt to delete the old web pages.

  • Always check for duplicate content. 


To make sure you are the sole source of an article, use services like CopyScape. This will help eliminate duplicate contents. Through services like CopyScape, you will be able to determine whether your content has duplicates or none.

The search engines abhor duplicate content. Don’t make the search engines hate your website. Getting penalized by the search engines is surely the last thing that you would want to happen especially now when the search engines are the major sources of traffic.

RingJohn is a web marketing and online advertising company that offers expert services like Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click Advertising, Web Marketing Training, SEO Training, Link Building, Brand Monitoring, Content Writing, Website Analytics, and more. See http://www.ringjohn.com for a complete list of all RingJohn’s web marketing services.