The Duplicate Content Problem

Dec 27, 2006

Content pilferage is a big problem on the Internet. It is mostly done by webmasters and bloggers that crawl web pages and blogs and gather/publish content to earn ad money. It not only devalues your content (you must have worked you butt off writing/generating your content), it also creates the duplicate content problem for your website. Some SEO experts opine that duplicate content — same content present on multiple web pages — causes a dip in your rankings as you are penalized for duplication, even if you’ve got nothing to do with it. But this could be a needless worry because the official Google webmaster’s blog says:

Don’t fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it’s highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site’s presence in Google. If you do spot a case that’s particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.

You never know.

You can use Google to look for your content on other websites. Copy a big chunk of your text to your clipboard and then search for it on Google using the quotes, for instance:

“Your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…your text…”

But what do you do if your content is being duplicated somewhere else without your consent?

Write to the offending webmaster

The first step would be to politely write to the webmaster. People who steal are generally timid so if they’re made aware that you know what they are doing, they quietly remove your content from their pages.

Try to get the link blacklisted

Somehow try to get the website link blacklisted. You can do this by writing to various search engines.

Use Creative Commons

Obtain the Creative Commons license and display the image prominently on your blog or website. Although the automated content crawlers won’t be deterred, the humans might find it a bit intimidating.

Alter your content

I know this can be a pain in the ass (arse, whatever) but as a last resort you can alter your content a bit to make it appear different than the duplicated content.

Technorati Tags: duplicate content, content theft, plagiarism, protecting blog content, creative commons