Ways Publishers Can Cope With The Mounting Challenge Of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content and, particularly, precisely how it is seen by the search engines is causes heated debate and there are a wide range of opinions on the subject. As if this were not enough in itself, the extent of the problem as far as articles is concerned is to some degree on whether you are a writer or a publisher. Here in this short article we are going to discuss the problem from the perspective of the publisher.

There is an incredible quantity of duplicate content floating about now and there are clearly times when it is right to use it. For instance, if you have a site dealing with American history you could decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or indeed the contents of the entire document. Clearly here it would be out of the question to rewrite it in order to avoid any duplicate content penalty.

At the same time, if you find an article which would provide valuable content for your visitors you might well feel that it is right to put it on your site. Here the writer clearly holds the copyright to the article and will usually only allow its use providing it is not edited in any way and that he is given credit for the article by adding his 'resource' paragraph at the conclusion of the article.

In both of these cases you will clearly be adding a page to your site which will be seen by the search engines as duplicate content and is going to present you with difficulties as far as ranking highly in the search results is concerned. But does this matter?

Many site owners now have become obsessed with getting good search engine rankings and have lost sight of the real purpose of a site which is to provide a valuable resource for your visitors. If at this point you were expecting me to say that the prime purpose of your site is to make money for you then some re-thinking is needed.

One common problem for the majority of site owners is that while they want to use their site to make money the search engines are not in the slightest bit interested in whether you make money or not (setting aside the subject of their own advertising programs) and are going to rank pages in their search results according to how relevant each page is to the search term entered and whether or not they consider that the page will provide the searcher with the information that he wants.

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

Your aim should be to construct a site which provides valuable content for your visitors and which will have them staying on your site and navigating their way from page to page and is also going to have them book marking the site and coming back on a regular basis.

To a large degree this means that you have to add unique and fresh pages on a regular basis which you will have to write yourself or outsource to other people 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 your free search engine traffic. However, there are two additional things which you must take into consideration.

First, for your site to have 'authority' and to command 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 other people can be invaluable.

Second, despite the fact that the search engines rank pages rather than sites, there is no doubt that they are also evaluating your site as a whole and giving weight to your individual pages to some extent on their value as a part of your overall site.

The bottom line therefore is that, while the greater part of your site has to be composed of unique and fresh content, there is without doubt a role to be played by incorporating well written and relevant articles from other writers where these add weight to the message that your site is conveying.