An Intro To Google Filters – #9 The Duplicate Content Filter

Categorized | Entrepreneurship, Internet Marketing

An Intro To Google Filters – #9 The Duplicate Content Filter

Posted on 11 October 2007

In my continuing series on the filters Google uses to evaluate a website I wanted to discuss the Duplicate Content Filter.

How It Works

In an attempt to make the search results more valuable to its users, Google implemented the duplicate content filter to prevent the same content from appearing multiple times in the search results. In the early days of search engine optimization webmasters used to create content and then distribute it to as many different websites as they could. That way when users typed in a keyword, the webmaster’s same article would come up dozens of times and they would dominate the search results.

Another problem was that devious webmasters trying to build content for their own websites would steal the articles from other sites and put it up as their own. They were trying to leverage the hard work and effort that other webmasters had put into creating unique content instead of trying to do it all themselves. The other webmasters got upset that their content was being stolen and the hijackers were happy because it was bringing in extra traffic.

The net result was not a valuable user experience because the search engine users would get pages and pages of the same results coming back from the exact same article – just published on different websites. The duplicate content filter removes this problem by selecting one source to use for the article and removing the rest from the search results. Now, instead of hijacking the top pages of the search results, webmasters will only rank once.

The question now becomes: if the same article has been listed on many different websites, which one will rank at the top for the same article? Google has tried to put into place measures so that the first website to have the content is the one that ranks (the original source) but this is not always the case. Sometimes the website with the highest Page Rank or most relevance also comes up on top.

What To Do

If you create valuable, unique content make sure to get it noticed quickly on your site. Have it linked from a high profile page, preferably the home page, and submit it to Google so they can rapidly add it to their index. Ensure that the content is relevant to the rest of your site and that the pages you have linking to it use the title as anchor text and also contain relevant text on the page.

If you are planning on allowing other people to use the content, make sure that Google has recognized it as being on your page first. You can do this by doing a quick Google search to see if the article has been added to the index or not. If it’s not there, don’t let anyone else use it yet.

Here are the other blog posts so far in my continuing series on Google Filters: