Duplicate Content: Avoid Search Engine Penalties

In the online world, search engine rankings are everything. Without coming up on the search engines for key phrases, all your hard work will never be seen - or not seen enough to make much of a difference. Because rankings are such a big deal, there are numerous ways that people try to cheat the engines - search engine spam - to trick engines into displaying a page higher in search results.

For every new trick, the coders behind our favorite search spots come up with a new filter. Their filters are designed to prevent results that are "fraudulent" - an attempt to intentionally trick the search engine. It's bad business for places like Google to return results to their users that aren't what the user is looking for - that user will turn elsewhere. In turn, it's bad business for people wanting to be listed at places like Google to try tricking them - they will turn elsewhere for quality links to list.

One of the latest methods of trying to trick the search bots is through duplicate content. It's also the latest on the list of filters and ways that you might - even accidentally - find yourself dropped from listings.

What Duplicate Content Is

The idea that it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch definitely applies here. There are many of us who don't intend to do anything to trick search engines, and work our butts off trying to come up with keywords and phrases that might snag us a better ranking. We find quality links, get quality inbound links, and make sure that there's plenty of content for a search engine "spider" to read.

All it took was a few bad apples abusing the idea of duplicate content to cause the rest of us a new hassle.

In its most obvious form, duplicate content is a page that is an exact copy of another page. In the past, many people thought that creating copies of their content would earn them higher rankings - in other words, that by repeating the same words in different spots on their website, popular search engines would think their content was keyword rich. To an extent, it worked because having several pages with the same content brought several listings on a search.