Ways Publishers Can Cope With The Increasing Question Of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content and, particularly, just how it is seen by the major search engines is being hotly debated and there are a wide range of opinions. As if this debate is not enough, the size of the problem as far as articles is concerned is to a certain degree on whether you are publishing or writing articles. In this short article we are going to examine the problem from the publisher's perspective.

There is an incredible amount of duplicate content about today and there are clearly occasions when it is proper to make use of it. For instance, if you have a site talking about American history you could decide to provide your visitors with details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or possibly the text of the entire document. Obviously in this case it would be ridiculous to attempt to rewrite it in order to avoid a duplicate content penalty.

Similarly, if you discover an article that would be of value to your visitors then you may well feel that it is appropriate to publish it on your site. In this case the writer clearly owns the copyright 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 adding his 'resource' paragraph at the conclusion of the article.

In both cases you will clearly be adding a page to your site that will 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 is this important?

A large number of site owners today have become obsessed with gaining high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the real purpose of a site which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. If at this juncture you were expecting me to say that the central objective of your site is to make money for you then some re-thinking is required.

One problem for a lot of site owners is that while they want to use their site to make money the search engines are not concerned about whether or not you make money (putting on one side the subject of their own in-house search advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results depending upon how relevant a page is to the search term entered and whether they consider that the page will give the searcher the information that he wants.

Of course, if your own page is adjudged to be relevant and placed highly in the search results you are going to receive traffic and therefore make money and herein lies the key.

Your aim must be to construct a site that provides valuable content for your visitors and that is going to keep them on your site and navigating from page to page and is also going to have them book marking the site and returning frequently.

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

First, if your site is going to have 'authority' and to retain your visitors' attention it will need to provide both depth and width in covering your subject and it is here that referring to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be extremely helpful.

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

The bottom line therefore is that, while most of your site needs to be composed of fresh and unique content, there is clearly a role to be played by using relevant and well written articles from other writers when these add weight to the overall message that your site is putting across.

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 business articles and much more.