What Exactly Is Duplicate Content

Hi,
If you write a unique un-spun article and submit it, say to Ezine Articles, your article will be copied and posted word for word on blogs, article directories, social networking and other sites. This is not duplicate content.

You can check this out for yourself. Go to Google and copy the exact contents of any article or product review appearing anywhere online. Paste the contents into the search bar. Do this within quotation marks to get an exact search match. When you click search you will find multiple results from many different websites containing this exact article word for word. So this shows that Google does not penalize duplicate content.

When you bookmark your article on social bookmarking sites, it will be distributed and will appear on scores of bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Technorati to name a few. Social bookmarking will increase the number of back links to your site and is an excellent strategy to give your pages or site a high ranking and drive traffic there.

Sometimes you want your article to appear on someone's blog. You may have an agreement with the blog owner to submit only the original article, the subject of which you have researched. In this case you cannot post this article on other sites.

So what exactly is duplicate content?

When you post the same article on different pages of the same domain to manipulate the rankings and fool Google, this is duplicate content and Google will penalize you by not indexing your site altogether. It's no longer possible to fool Google, as they have developed advanced algorithms that can detect duplicate content. So don't try to rig the search results.

Google wants to give people only relevant results and does not want to show the same pages in the search results.

You can solve this problem of duplicate content by rewriting the whole article or getting a ghost writer to write articles for you. But first make sure that it is unique. There are also other ways to address the duplicate content issue which I will not discuss in this article.

Two or more separate web pages that contain substantially the same content are said to contain duplicate content.