Helios Web

While I read the discussion forums and blogs these days, a lot of people are concerned about their sites being penalized for duplicate content. I am one of many people with this concern, since I have used other people’s articles on my blog to add fresh and authoritative content to my site. Some people feel that all the panic over duplicate content isn’t necessary once you really understand what duplicate content is and how the duplicate content filters really work. Others see it as a major concern. This article will explain what duplicate content is, when you may be penalized for it, and what you can do to avoid it.

Duplicate content is not only about the pages on a site being the same or too similar. It can also be different websites using the same or very similar template. I know this well, as my own site stems from a program that creates the same template for thousands of users, and we are constantly encouraged to change and customize our sites to make them different from everyone else’s. The reason duplicate content is deemed a bad thing from a search engine’s perspective is because it is considered spamming when people deliberately throw up a site, or content that is identical or very similar to another in hopes that they will get indexed higher and quicker in the search engines, or have more listings.

When the search engines discover this duplicate content on the sites they scan, they use a filter to remove the offending content. This is what getting “dinged” means. The problem is that most people write good, original content for their sites, but still get dinged because there is other same, or very similar content out there already. This hardly seems fair if you are an honest person, I know…
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Blogging is extremely popular these days. And the most popular stand-alone blog engine is WordPress. It is flexible, has many useful features and there is a lot of eye-catching templates for it. But those who have a WordPress blog must be aware of a serious problem that can cause your blog to be removed from Google’s search results. The problem is: Duplicate Content.

WordPress content management system which, when used with the default configuration, is not duplicate content proof. In fact this CMS is capable to render almost 100% of your content duplicate. As usual the fault of the system has roots in its advantages. WordPress has many features facilitating blogging and linking, such as RSS feeds to posts and comments, trackback URLs, monthly archives and so on. In the same time this variety of URLs returning similar or identical pages represents a clear case of duplicate content.

WordPress And Duplicate Content

The first evidences of duplicate content produced by your WordPress CMS can be found in your sidebar. They are category pages and monthly/daily archives. Category pages store your articles posted under the same topic—a category. Such pages have no unique content; they are just a collection of your previous posts. Monthly and daily archives also simply group your previous articles by the date of posting. Sometimes when you have only one post in a given day, the archive page for the date and your post are totally identical.

The next case of duplicate content is even more prominent. It can be your home page itself. If it contains not excerpts but the full text of your posts, then it duplicates your post pages. This also applies to the “next/previous entries” pages—those accessible via /page/2, /3, /4 etc.
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