Google and Duplicate Content

Many of you who follow my 'attempt to take over the world' as a friend recently dubbed my major promotional network will be confused by one thing:
I have duplicate content, but I rank high - how?

To understand this, you first need to realize what Google considers duplicate content.

Exhibit A

If you buy a website of Ebay that is designed to earn AdSense income, and is a mirror of another site - you will be banned.

Exhibit B

If you use mambo, joombala, wordpress, b2evolution, etc., then when Google looks at your site, it sees duplicate content - because it reads code, not content.

You can look on your web site, and 200 others, and the first 200 characters are identical. In many cases, crawlers rarely go beyond 200 - 500 characters . If everything is identical to other sites, the crawlers leave 'before reaching the article.'

(but gracepub, you use B2Evolution. Yes, I do, and I also have a great programmer, Mark, who changes the names of my images, changes strings of PHP code, and does all sorts of other things so that my b2evolution skins/code is not exactly like yours)

Exhibit C

"This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has articles in "regular" and "printer" versions and neither set is blocked in robots.txt or via a no-index meta tag, we'll choose one version to list.

This is from Google's site. Translated, it means that Google doesn't ban content - it just only lists one. That is how I get away with it. My sites are all 'equally important' so that I really don't care if Google lists site A, or site B.
I believe that this is my 'saving grace.' Google finds good content at all my sites.
I also use 'no follow' robots to keep Google off pages that are from free content sites.

What To Do?

The first thing you should do is put the original version on your website. Leave it alone for six months. That means that Google will recognize your version as the 'original' and 'not list' the other versions.

After six months, put the article on your blog, in a free content site, etc. YOU are not the one using the duplicate content, THEY are.

If someone syndicates your blog, takes your articles, etc., it is 'their' site that is not indexed.

Or, if you want, just change the wording in the title, and some of the words in the article before adding your work to a free content site.
I hope this lowers the panic level for some web managers and freelance writers.





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