How Does Duplicate Content Affect Your Website
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Do you know that good content in websites have far reaching effects on your website than you can possibly imagine? Your website can drive excellent traffic by impressing the search engines through good content. All the search engines including the most popular ones such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, etc., depend a great deal on the content of your website to give the right information to their users. When the internet users surf the web and type their search queries, their queries have to be matched with the websites and the accurate matches have to be listed. We do not get to see what goes behind the screen when we make our searches. Search engines have to sweat it out to fetch you the right results. A very complex process takes place even though it is accomplished in just few seconds. Search engines have to parse your website and assess your website and try to keep a complete record of your website. The content that is present in your website is very important in this process.
When the content that is found in your website is same as the content that is found in another page, search engines are thrown off balance. They certainly do not like to be thrown off balance and they discourage such a practice. At another level if two web pages with the same content are presented in the search results, internet users that make the searches doubt the quality of the search engines. This affects the quality of the user experience and search engines cannot like to take such risks because there is a huge competition amongst search engines themselves. They do not like to lose their regular users to their competitors so they penalize the websites or web pages that make use of duplicate content by pushing them to the bottom of the search results or completely ignoring them in the search results.
How do search engines decide which website is to be listed and which website is to be ignored? Search engines list their websites based on the history of the web pages. If your content has been online before the other page, then the page with later date is ignored. You will therefore not have to worry when someone steals your content and uses them in their website. However search engines like Google have forums where you can report duplicate content. This will help the search engine as well as the website owner to curb the menace of content stealing under control. Though search engines may know which content originated first, internet users may not know which is original content and which page has actually stolen the content. This can affect your brand name and image online. So when you see your website content being stolen make sure to report it. At the same time make sure that your website has 100% original content. Hire only SEO service providers that guarantee original content. Make sure that your SEO service provider does not offer you with plagiarized content which can result in search engine penalty.
