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Duplicate Content?

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  • 19-02-2011 3:02pm
    #1
    topgear01
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1 ✭


    I am writing for a travel site on cities & what to do, how to get around etc most of my writing is similar to other sites i.e giving the same information but in my own words, my questins is, will google see this as duplicate content and penalize the site.

    I m concerned as i have heard duplicate/similar content is penalize?

    Much appreciate any advice.

    Thanks


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    #2
    PaulPinnacle
    Registered Users Posts: 447 ✭✭PaulPinnacle


    topgear01 wrote: »
    I m concerned as i have heard duplicate/similar content is penalize?
    Duplicate content is one of the most commonly misunderstood areas of SEO. To be fair, google go to great lengths to try and clear it up, but due to so much misinformation out there in the area it tends to get lost in translation.
    Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

    Assuming you're not intentionally breaking the webmaster guidelines in an attempt to manipulate rankings (scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or republishing content without adding any additional value), you shouldn't have anything to worry about. If you're simply giving 'similar' information, but doing it in your own words with your own input, it won't be 'duplicate' and should be just fine.


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    #3
    cormee
    Registered Users Posts: 1,801 ✭✭✭cormee


    While Google won't penalise you for it you should avoid 'duplicate' content for other reasons. Google likes original content, if your content is the same as every other site you're up against established sites and are going to find it hard to go up the rankings.

    Do some keyword research and find related phrases that are popular searches (but there isn't so much existing content already out there) and write copy about that.


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    #4
    declanon
    Registered Users Posts: 16 ✭declanon


    I agree with PaulPinnacle, you shouldn't have any issues, so long as your not copy and pasting content from other travel websites and using it as your own.

    One other duplicate content issue you might consider. If you're using a CMS such as WordPress. You'll need to control identical content / posts appearing in more than one place on your site.

    Example:
    • original post -> http://my-travel-site.com/blog/my-favorite-city/
    • category -> http://my-travel-site.com/blog/category/locations/
    • tag -> http://my-travel-site.com/blog/tag/bars/
    • tag -> http://my-travel-site.com/blog/tag/restaurants/
    • tag -> http://my-travel-site.com/blog/tag/attractions/

    The original post would show up in 1 category and 3 tag archive pages. So you might want to do a little research on displaying post excerpts / teaser text on archive pages and/or adding canonical meta tags to tell the search engine the original URL of the post.

    Or simply block categories and tags via a robots.txt file.

    From Google's perspective they are pretty good at finding the right content, but it doesn't hurt to point them in the right direction.


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