How Publishers Can Cope With The Increasing Challenge Of Duplicate Content

The subject of duplicate content and, especially, precisely how it is seen by the major search engines is causes heated debate and opinions vary widely. As if this were not enough in itself, the scope of the problem when it comes to article marketing depends to a certain extent on whether you are a publisher or a writer. In this short article we are going to examine the problem from the publisher's perspective.

There is a massive quantity of duplicate content floating around now and there are clearly occasions when it is correct to use it. For example, if you own a site dealing with American history you might decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post extracts from it, or even the text of the whole document. Clearly here it would be most inappropriate to attempt to rewrite it to escape a duplicate content penalty.

At the same time, if you discover a well written article that would provide valuable content for your audience then you might feel that it is appropriate to publish it on your site. In this case the writer clearly owns the copyright to the article and will normally only allow it to be used as long as it is not edited in any manner and that he is credited for your use of the article by adding his 'resource' paragraph at the conclusion of the article.

In both of these cases you will clearly be adding a page to your site that will be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and is going to present you with problems when it comes to ranking high in the search engine results. But does this really matter?

Many site owners now have become obsessed with getting good search engine rankings and have forgotten about the true purpose of a site which is to provide a resource for your visitors. If at this point you were expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your site is to make you money then you will have to do some re-thinking.

One common problem for many site owners is that while they want to use their site to make money the search engines are not in the slightest bit interested in whether or not you make money (setting aside the issue of their own advertising programs) and will rank pages in their search results based upon how relevant a page is to the search term entered and whether they think that the page will provide the searcher with the information required.

Of course, if your page is considered relevant and placed high in the search results you will get traffic and thus make money and it is here that the key is to be found.

Your objective must be to build a site that provides valuable content for your audience and that is going to have them staying on your site and navigating from page to page and is also going to have them adding your site to their favorites menu and coming back on a regular basis.

To a large extent this means that you have to provide fresh and unique pages on a regular basis which you will have to write yourself or outsource to other people to write for you. It is these unique and fresh pages that will be indexed by the search engines to bring you free search engine traffic. However, there are two other things that you have to think about.

First of all, for your site to have 'authority' and to hold your visitors' attention it will have to provide both depth and width in covering your subject and here making reference to and quoting or publishing the work of other people can be invaluable.

Second, though search engines rank pages rather than sites, there can be little doubt that they also evaluate your site as a whole and give weight to individual site pages to a certain extent on their value as a part of your overall site.

The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your site should be composed of fresh and unique content, there is certainly a role to be played by using well written and relevant articles from other writers when these add weight to the message that your site is putting across.