Duplicate content can negatively affect your search engine ranking in a number of ways. This is of major importance as a high search engine ranking will direct more visitors to your website. People will not want to visit a site if they can find the information in other places. You will have to be trustworthy and offer fresh, new content on a regular basis to ensure that people come to you first for the latest on a given topic. Unfortunately, duplicate content can be generated by accident. Yet, the search engine ranking software does not know the cause of duplicate content so you will still see the negative effects. There are many ways to avoid duplicate content, including that which is accidentally generated. By following some simple steps, you can have content not found on other sites.

Avoiding duplicate content is very important when developing and maintaining a website. Your content will always need to be unique in order to generate repeat traffic. In addition, search engines prefer pages with distinct information. When a search engine goes to rank your site, it will look for original content. Additionally it will look for content which is similar to that found at other sites. When there is a question about which site should be ranked higher, the search engine will look at a number of factors.

To raise your search engine ranking, you must offer information not found on other sites. A reputation of providing unique, reliable information will also help to increase your score, thereby moving you higher on the search engine list. Another factor which will help is the length of time your domain has been operational so don’t change names once you have become established. This can actually lower your rankings. Also, be sure to include incoming links when setting up your site.

Unfortunately, duplicate content can be generated accidentally. There are a number of ways you can provide duplicate content for a search engine without realizing it. This may happen when you have blogs or archive pages on your site. Category and printable pages are another culprit of this syndrome.

If you provide multiple pages with the same content (for example, a printable page and the original page) you inherit the following problems:

• Inbound links might point to different destinations, thus reducing the inbound link power to the targeted resource. This happens if users unintentionally link to your printable pages, for example.
• Search engines might classify your site as a spam site. This should not happen in the above example, but might happen if your page contains lots of content accessible via different URLs (e.g. optional parameters, parameters in different order).

To avoid duplicate content being generated by these types of pages, write your own content. Ensure that you cover different angles of the same topic. Never use content from another site unless you directly source it and provide some information of your own. This may be in the form of a review or it may be advancements that have developed as a result of the information you used. Avoid posting under multiple categories also. Choose one or two specific categories in which to submit your web pages. Be sure to set your URL preference. This is done quite easily using your webmaster tool. Here you will want to force site visitors to use the non-www URL link. This will help to avoid having duplicate content flags raised by search engine sites.

Having repetitive content on your website can be detrimental to your business as a whole. If visitors determine that you are using information from other sites rather than generating your own, they may choose to go to the original source. Trust will be lost in you and that can have very negative consequences. People need to not only trust you, they need to know that your site reports information accurately and reliably. Originality is also a must. If duplicate content has been an issue for you in the past, the above information will help you to get back on track and increase your search engine ranking as well as site traffic.