How the search engines view duplicate content

For most web site owners waiting for their search engine rankings to improve and to bring long awaited visitors can be a frustrating waiting game. Its little wonder webmasters look for shortcuts to improve their search engine ranking to gain better ranking faster. Unfortunately sometimes these shortcuts are on a direct collision course with the search engines webmaster guidelines.

Manipulating search engine ranking results by inflating a web sites link popularity is one of the ways web site owners are trying to beat their competitors in the search results. Sadly, a fast tracked link popularity building approach can sometimes result in serious search engine penalties, or worse, a complete search engine ban despite the web site owners best intentions. One of the seemingly fast link popularity building approaches is the creation and maintenance of mirrored web site content on other domains. Although having a few pages of duplicate content on another domain is not enough reason to get a web site banned by the search engines, but if its done with the purpose of manipulating link popularity it can be a very real risk.

Duplicate content is not the same as duplicate domain

For example publishing the same article on several different ezine directories is an acceptable form of information distribution on the Internet. However the copying of large amounts of content from one web site to another is an entirely different form of duplicate content in the eyes of the search engines. Thanks to sophisticated search engines ranking algorithms and human editors, search engines can easily sniff out duplicate content when its done with the intention of link spamming. You can see an example of this technology used on http://www.copyscape.com/ a duplicate content detection tool.

We also cant forget the competitors who are also very eager to find and report duplicate content violators to the search engines. Everyone wants to ensure a fair competition for top ranking in the natural search results. Webmasters get very irate when they see other web site owners trying to use links spam, duplicate content or other black hat SEO techniques. Once a web site is reported to the search engines using mirrored sites for better search engine ranking, the search engines have an obligation to validate those claims. Getting out of search engines penalties can take a long time especially if Google suspects the violation occurred with the participation and full knowledge of the web site owner.

Mirrored domains carry real risks

Some web sites run the risk of falling into this same trap by creating mirrored domains. Whats worse, the mirrored domains are usually hosted on the same web server, making detection of the duplicate domain content very easy for the search engines. Even if the mirrored content is hosted on a different web server the search engines can make the connection between the web sites using the domain registration information found using a WHOIS search. Although a single duplicate domain page will most likely not result in any penalty, but if a large number of pages are found with identical content on another domain, a search engine penalty can be looming over the web site owners head.

Search engines represent a large percentage of online visibility, therefore its important to maximize the web sites visibility for its most important target keyword phrases, but we have to be careful not to get our web site penalized unnecessarily by using techniques deemed inappropriate by the search engines. The truth is there are very few shortcuts in search engines optimization that doesnt result in some type of detection by the search engines, and when they do find violators of their search engine rules the penalties are fairly harsh.