How To Avoid The Google.com Duplicate Content Filter

By Christoph Puetz

More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly
available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This
results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. In
cases of websites build on news feeds or data feeds you can
even find websites that match each other 100% (except for the
design). Several copies of the same content in a search engine
does not really do any good and so Google apparently decided to
weed out some of this duplicate content to be able to deliver
cleaner and better search results.

Plain copies of websites were hit hardest. If a webmaster was
publishing the exact same content on more than one domain, all
domains in question were eventually removed from Google's
index. Many websites based on affiliate programs suddenly took
a big hit in loss of traffic from Google.com. Shortly after
this started some webmaster forums saw the same complaints and
stories again and if 1 + 1 was put together a clear picture of
the situation was available: a duplicate content filter was
applied.

Duplicate content is not always bad and will always exist in
one way or the other. News websites are the best example of
duplicate content. Nobody expects those to be dropped from
Google's index.

So, how can webmasters avoid the duplicate content filter?
There are quite a few things webmasters can do when using
duplicate content of any sort and still create unique pages and
content from it. Let's see some of these options explained here.

1) Unique content on pages with duplicate content.

On pages where duplicate content is being used, unique content
should be added. I do not mean like just a few different words
or a link/navigation menu. If you (the webmaster) can add 15% -
30% unique content to pages where you display duplicate content
the overall ratio of duplicate content compared to the overall
content of that page goes down. This will reduce the risk of
having a page flagged as duplicate content.

2) Randomization of content

Ever seen those "Quote of the Day" thingies on some websites?
It adds a random quote of the day to a page at any given time.
Every time you come back the page will look different. Those
scripts can be used for many more things than just displaying a
quote of the day with just a few code changes. With some
creativity a webmaster can use such a script to create the
impression pages are always updated and always different. This
can be a great tool to prevent Google to apply the duplicate
content filter.

3) Unique content

Yes, unique content is still king. But sometimes you just
cannot work around using duplicate content at all. That is
alright. But how about adding unique content to your website,
too. If the overall ratio of unique content and duplicate
content is well-balanced chances that the duplicate content
filter applies to your website are much lower. I personally
recommend that a website has at least 30% of unique content to
offer (I admit - I am sometimes having difficulties myself to
reach that level but I try).

Will this guarantee that your website stays in Google's index?
I don't know. To be most successful a website should be
completely unique. Unique content is what draws visitors to a
website. Everything else can be found somewhere else, too and
visitors have no reason to just visit one particular website if
they can get the same thing somewhere else.

About The Author:

Christoph Puetz is a successful Entrepreneur
and international book author. Websites currently operated by
Christoph are: http://www.highlandsranch.us and
http://www.smallbusinessland.com