Duplicate Content - Why Shoot Yourself in the Foot?
An article By Vishven Chandran
Brief Look at Duplicate Content
Across the world wide web as it exists today, the duplication of content comes in many forms; some of which are strikingly obvious, but others stealthy, and much less detectable. In the case of the former, duplicate content primarily involves the practice of copy-and-pasting articles from various sources and subsequently attempting to pass it off as ones own. Some subscribers of this type of ‘article writing’ even occasionally alter the arrangement of a piece of work, simply to make it slightly less obvious that it is an almost word-for-word copy from a single source.
Naturally, such methods are easily detected and often exposed, but instead of deterring the masses, this fact has given rise in popularity to an entirely different form of duplication that is known as rewriting and is definitely less obvious. By hiring the cheap services of freelance writers that are easily available, commissions for rewritten content are growing to be very much in the vogue. Instead of researching from multiple sources, organizing facts, and then producing a unique article, rewriting consists of using altered sentence structure, synonyms, and small variations of content in order to reproduce an article that is essentially the same as the original, but different enough to fool most search engines.
Granted, rewriting is probably preferable to en-block duplication, however it is a crude form of freelance writing that takes advantage of what is normally the work of other freelance writers in order to serve the needs of unscrupulous websites.
Short Term Gain, Long Term Expense
Although it is fairly common knowledge that many search engines, Google included, have admitted that the ‘duplicate content penalty’ is not as strict as was previously thought, the truth is that it should not be ignored. Fact is, Google explicitly states that using large amounts of duplicated content for the sole purpose of manipulating search engine rankings will result in websites being penalized. Even if current search engines cannot detect rewritten duplicated content, who is to say that they will be unable to for very much longer?
In light of this, the question that any website owner should be asking himself is, “Do I want to risk a large portion of my hard earned traffic by using duplicated content?”
Logically speaking, it seems to be a risk that is not worth taking, especially when coupled with the fact that duplicate content, even that which is rewritten by freelance writers, is generally rather woeful in terms of quality. While it could be argued that this hardly matters due to the fact that such content is geared towards search engines, not people, the underlying fact of the matter is that at the very end of the day the holy grail that is traffic comes in the form of people, and should be catered to.
Consider briefly whether people browsing any given website would prefer to be enlightened by well thought out and researched articles of a high quality, or find themselves facing deplorable content that should never even see the light of day. Obviously, it is the former type of articles that shine through in this regard, and could in fact even create a loyal following of interested web surfers that will further enhance the traffic to any given website.
End of the day, by choosing to opt for duplicate or rewritten content that is crafted in bulk by some freelance writers, websites are selling themselves short of their true potential. Not only are they risking penalization when search engine algorithms catch up with the newer rewriting techniques, but they are also denying themselves a valuable source of traffic as they do so.
No website should ever rightfully make this mistake, as the affect of a single unique article that is informative and engaging could easily trump the value of a whole score of rewrites and duplicated content.
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