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Ways Publishers Can Cope With The Growing Question Of Duplicate Content

By: Donald Saunders

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Duplicate content and, especially, just how it is seen by the major search engines is being hotly debated and there are a wide range of opinions on the subject. As if this is not enough by itself, the extent of the problem as far as articles is concerned depends to some extent on whether you are a writer or publisher. In this brief article we are going to discuss the problem from the publisher's perspective.

There is a massive amount of duplicate content around today and there are clearly times when it is proper to make use of it. For example, if you have a website dealing with American history you may decide to provide your visitors with details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or indeed the text of the entire document. Clearly here it would be inappropriate to say the least to rewrite it in order to avoid any duplicate content penalty.

Similarly, if you find an article that would be of value to your audience you might well feel that it is right to put it on your website. Here the writer clearly holds the rights to the article and will normally only permit its use providing it is not altered in any manner and that he is given credit for your use of the article by including his 'about the author' paragraph at the conclusion of the article.

In both cases you will clearly be adding a page to your website that is going to be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and will present you with problems when it comes to ranking well in the search engine results. But does this matter?

A large number of webmasters today are obsessed with achieving good search engine rankings and have lost sight of the real purpose of a website which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. Now, if at this point you were expecting me to say that the central objective of your website is to make money for you then some re-thinking is necessary.

One common problem for most webmasters is that while they wish to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether you make money or not (setting aside the subject of their own advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in the search results depending upon how relevant a page is to the search being performed and whether they think that the page is going to give the searcher the information that he requires.

Obviously, if your own page is considered relevant and placed high in the search results you are going to get traffic and thus make money and herein lies the secret.

Your aim must be to build a website that provides valuable content for your audience and that is designed to have them staying on your website and navigating from page to page and will also have them adding your website to their favorites menu and coming back frequently.

To a large extent this means that you need to add unique and fresh content on a regular basis which you will need to write yourself or outsource to other people to write for you. It is these unique and fresh pages that will be picked up and indexed by the search engines to bring you free search engine traffic. However, there are two other things that you have to take into consideration.

First, for your website to have 'authority' and to command the attention of your visitors it will need to provide both depth and width in covering your subject and it is here that making reference to and quoting or publishing the work of other people can be extremely helpful.

Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages and not websites, there is no doubt that they also evaluate your website as a whole and give weight to individual site pages to some extent on their value as part of your overall website.

The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your website has to be composed of unique and fresh content, there is unquestionably a part to be played by incorporating relevant and well written articles from other writers when these add weight to the overall message that your website is conveying.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

WebMarketingCentre.com provides information on article writing and article submission and is also an article directory where you can pick up a free online article for your website or ezine and to which you can submit articles on a wide variety of topics including Internet articles and much more.

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