Duplicate Content - 2 Honest Mistakes That Could Be Hurting You

When it comes to internet marketing, you think youre doing everything right. After all, you dont take part in any Black Hat SEO techniques, you dont plagiarize, and you focus squarely on unique content and creating an informative site for your visitors. However, there could still be two duplicate content issues lurking on your website, and you dont even know it.

To understand how you could be making honest duplicate content mistakes, you have to know exactly how duplicate content works. Search engine spiders crawl over every internet page, saving information as they go. If they see that information somewhere else, they deem it as duplicate content, and the page is removed from the index. Once its filtered out, the page has no bearing, positive or negative, on your search engine ranking.

Spiders cannot tell the plagiarists from the honest folks who simply made a mistake. Thats why it is so important to learn about these two duplicate content mistakes:

1. Print versions on your website

Youve never really thought about it, but you assume that a print version will make things easier for your visitors. However, you have just made a common duplicate content mistake. After all, a print version is identical to another page on your website. It contains all of the same information, word for word. When the spiders arrive at your print version, they see it as duplicate content. Just like that, the search engines think that youre purposely posting duplicate content when all youve done is make a common, honest mistake.

If you want to be completely safe, avoid print versions altogether. Are they really that vital to your site? If you absolutely have to include them on your site, make them nofollow, so that the search engines will know not to crawl on them.

2. Product descriptions

Youre selling a product, and the manufacturer has sent you a great description of it. You figure that you could not write anything better, so you publish the description on your site. Unfortunately, hundreds of other people may have just done the same thing. Just like that, youve made a huge duplicate content mistake.

When the spiders find it, theyre going to know that the description has been published in other places, and that its duplicate content. The search engine spiders are not sophisticated enough to realize that its from the manufacturer, and theres a legitimate reason that its the same as other sites. To the spiders, duplicate content is duplicate content.

Once youre product description has been deemed duplicate content, it will be removed the index. When people search for your product, your page will not come up in the results. Think about how many sales you could be missing out on because of this honest mistake! To be on the safe side, rewrite your product descriptions before publishing them.