What Scores as Duplicate Content Can Be Accidental. But as They Say in the Law:
Ignorance is No Excuse - and Whack, The Duplicate Penalty!

 page 9 of 13

Part 9. Every month, the page views were better and better. 5505, 6420, 8658, 11498, 13739, 15080, 18249, 19765, 22526. It seemed that the sky was the limit.

And then ... 21935! What! That wasn't supposed to happen.

But then, 23086, 26673. Okay. But then ... 26869, 27687. Yes, I was still getting some upward movement, but it had slowed. I was working. The work hardly showed in the results. And some pages just were not getting ranked at all.

What was it? The Duplicate Content Demon.

How to know if the problem is that the Duplicate Content Demon has dug its fangs deep into some pages? Do a word count. ONE: Add up the words of "repeat content" - copyright on the bottom, table of contents on the left, slogans and so forth that appear on lots of pages. (This is easy to do if you paste the words into Word. You can instantly get the word total. Note: if the words are part of an image, they don't count.) NOW, TWO: add up the words that are for that page only - what would be called content. The rule: the content has to make up over 50%.

There is a great duplicate checker - Copyscape - but it's doesn't do the word counting for you. Copyscape is best for seeing if anyone else is using your text.

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I've had so much learning to do about duplicate content. I had dozens of pages that didn't get ranked because they violated the count rule (like, short poems on a page with a long table of contents).

The worst kind of duplicate content: duplicate title tags and description tags. For Google, those are the most important words. THEY HAD BETTER BE DIFFERENT FOR EACH PAGE. I didn't understand this. I thought Google would like it better if similar pages had the same description, so it would be obvious that the site had a big section on one thing or another. NO!!! Google wants to know each page is different! I used the same tags - and only one page would rank. So much wasted effort - so much learning and redoing! Then the Google robot comes back, and is much happier.

The lesson: become a great listener, find out what the other - in this case, Google - wants. And avoid what can be seen as duplicated page content like the plague.

I had more learning to do around duplicate page content: posting articles is a good way of getting links back to your site. What I didn't know was that I had 2 choices:ONE, write new articles, different from anything on the site (though I could make it just a bit different); or TWO, have those pages not rank on my site. Arghhh!

How to stop the pain of working and working and not getting up the hill. Learn. Learn about what is considered duplicated content - and also learn about the heavy duplicate penalty.

Once you know, it's easy to steer clear of something that could be considered such content. So, consider yourself warned.

And where am I now? Page views are going up some more.

How did I manage not to learn about duplicated content with SiteSell? There are 3 possibilities. One, I design my own pages, so there are some features of SiteSell I don't use. Maybe those who use the SiteSell templates do better when it comes to duplicate content. Or two, maybe this is something SiteSell could put more emphasis on, in its blueprint. Or three, maybe it's there, but among so much information, that I just couldn't absorb it all - and so ended up learning the hard way. But I have learned.

I hope this piece of learning will be easier for you.

And that takes me to the present. You can go on to ...

GOOD-BYE DUPLICATE CONTENT -
I'm Ever Closer to Top Web Site Ranking
or
How to Create Home Business Web Site Success
or
Elsa Tries Social Networking

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