When you are building a site that you want to optimize for good search engine rankings one thing you will want to strive to avoid is duplicate content. Duplicate content is where more than one website has the exact same content on it. Anyone who has searched for something on the Internet has run across this. You type in the search engine term you want into the search engine and it brings back the top sites and half of them have the exact same stuff on it. Search engines like Google are trying hard to get rid of that type of problem so they have started to penalize sites that use duplicate content.

Duplicate content can come in many forms. Probably the most common form would be that of RSS feeds for blogs. There can be numerous sites all using the same RSS feeds and all then, by default, displaying the same content. Another common form of duplicate content comes when people run affiliate sites and simply copy and paste the sales text from the samples within the affiliate program. People also tend to copy and paste news articles and other articles from various popular sites onto their site. All of these practices can get you hit with the duplicate content penalty.

The best way to avoid the duplicate content penalty is to write fresh, interesting content for your site. If your website relies more on pictures and video, make the comments or descriptions of these pictures interesting and unique. You can quote people, but don’t take all of their words.

You will also want to avoid using duplicate title and description meta tags on all of your pages. If you have a site with twenty pages and each page as the same title and meta description, you are only hurting yourself. You will be better off taking a few minutes to write a new, unique title and meta description for each page of your site.

If you spend a lot of time and effort to SEO your website and research your keywords, don’t hurt yourself by using duplicate content.

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