With Internet-based professionals working remotely from all four corners of the world, duplication of blog and web content has indeed proliferated, so much so that increasingly more blog authors may or may not be aware that some of their posts are actually duplicate content.
The Problem With Duplicate Blog Content
There’s no doubt that plagiarism is the easiest, quickest and least expensive way to generate content. But that strategy comes at a cost. With duplicate content, your blog won’t rank as well because the material has already been published. Google and other search engines are adamantly opposed to duplicate content.
Google filters out websites with duplicate content by using the Supplemental Index of its database. Simply put, the GoogleBot crawls websites and blogs and looks for similar strings and content among the pages to see if it already exists on the web.
Let’s say that your blog shares duplicate content with a thousand other webpages or blogs. The GoogleBot will only pick a small number of these websites to include in its organic search results while the rest will be delegated to the Supplemental Index.
How it actually does this is quite complex, what you need to know is that your blog can be pushed way below the list and might not appear in the first 10 pages of organic search results IF AT ALL!
Avoiding Duplicate Blog Content
As it is, it is imperative that your blog must have original content - even if you are not the original creator of that content and have delegated that task to a ghost blogger. But how can you be sure when there are millions of publishers out there on the web writing articles?
The solution is quite simple: use an article checker or copyscape. There are dozens of these on the web - most are free with premium services catering to different markets (academic, professional publishers, Internet).
There are several advantages to using an article checker:
- An article checker helps you write original content.
When using an article checker, you reduce the risk of committing plagiarism.
When you key in a particular keyword in a search engine, it only reports the results at the ‘top of the rankings’. The challenge is that the plagiarised text is probably on a website or blog 20 or 30 pages down the list which means you’re not going to find it quickly or easily.
An article checker crawls web pages and blog posts just like a search engine and shows you how many pages bear the same strings that match your content. It “checks” your content against other published materials online and, most often than not, even your own sources. After analyzing your material, it displays a percentage result stating how similar or original your work is compared to others, the format of the report and details depend on the service you use. Premium services are substantially more detailed and are recommended if you use low-cost ghost writers for you blog on an on-going basis.
- An article checker helps you protect your own original blog content.
Imagine producing original blog posts totally and seeing a marked increase in your rankings and search results with increased organic traffic. You’re happy, but then over a short period of time, your blog traffic starts to drop off for no good reason. What happened?
Someone might be having a field day doing a mishmash of your articles, rewording some parts, then passing them off as their own and getting YOUR traffic! In fact mirroring your success…
If you suspect this is going on, use an article checker. Since an article checker functions just like a duplicate content checker, it will track websites and blogs with content that are similar to yours. What you do when you find the copycats is a discussion for another day and blog post.
One last point:
Don’t get paranoid, just be diligent about what you’re doing if you use low-cost, remote sub-contractors whom you don’t know very well.
About The Author:
Dr Marc Dussault is Australia's #1 Exponential Growth Strategist. As the founder of his own start-up company, Marc used Exponential Marketing strategies, with no money down, to build one of his service companies 3 times faster, with double the industry average sales per employee, with a fraction of the industry’s employee attrition rate while consistently producing twice the profitability of his competitors.
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