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How Publishers Can Deal With The Rising Problem Of Duplicate Content

The use of duplicate content and, in particular, exactly how it is viewed by the search engines is causes heated debate and opinions vary widely. As if this debate were not enough, the extent of the problem when it comes to article marketing depends to a certain degree on whether you are a writer or a publisher. In this short article we are going to consider the problem from the publisher's perspective.

There is a massive amount of duplicate content about now and there are clearly occasions when it is appropriate to use it. For example, if you have a website dealing with American history you might decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or indeed the text of the whole document. Obviously in this instant it would be inappropriate to say the least to rewrite it in order to avoid any duplicate content penalty.

Similarly, if you discover an article which would provide valuable content for your audience then you may well feel that it is fitting to publish it on your website. In this case the writer clearly owns the rights to the article and will usually only permit it to be used providing it is not changed in any way and that he is given credit for your use of the article by adding his 'resource' paragraph at the foot of the article.

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

A large number of webmasters now have become obsessed with gaining high search engine rankings and have lost sight of the real purpose of a website which is to provide a resource for your visitors. If at this point you were expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your website is to make you money then some re-thinking is required.

One problem for many webmasters is that while they wish to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether or not you make money (putting to one side the separate subject of their own advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results based upon how relevant a page is to the search term used and whether or not they feel that the page is going to give the searcher the information which he is looking for.

Of course, if your page is considered relevant and placed high in the search results you are going to receive traffic and therefore make money and herein lies the secret.

Your aim ought to be to construct a website which provides valuable content for your audience and which will have them staying on your website and navigating from page to page and will also have them book marking the website and returning on a regular basis.

To a large degree this means that you must add fresh and unique pages on a regular basis which you will have to write yourself or outsource to others to write for you. It is these fresh and unique pages which will be picked up and indexed by the search engines to provide you with free search engine traffic. But, there are two additional things which you have to consider.

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

Second, though search engines rank pages and not websites, there is little doubt that they are also evaluating your website as a whole and giving credit to individual pages to a certain extent on their value as a part of your overall website.

The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your website should be made up of fresh and unique content, there is certainly a part to be played by incorporating relevant and well written articles from other writers where these add weight to the overall message that your website is putting across.

Article Source: http://blisspublisher.com

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