Can Duplicate Content Still Get Ranked?
Does Google still rank duplicate content? How about the other search engines?
With all the talk of duplicate content and penalties and such and such, you’d think the search engines would have just stopped ranking it completely. But they haven’t. And all the evidence you really need that they haven’t is Google’s recent (within the past 6 months) announcement of a new recognized tag – the canonical URL tag.
The canonical tag – attribute, if you will – is a relationship attribute that you can append to your URLs so that Google knows which one you want indexed. That is, which version of duplicate content on your own site that you prefer to be found in Google’s index. If Google wasn’t still ranking duplicate content then such an URL wouldn’t be necessary.
Of course, it could be argued that the canonical URL is necessary so that Google doesn’t make the decision for you as to which duplicate content is more important, and that would be true. But I’ve actually seen cases where the same content is indexed multiple times across several websites.
The question for webmasters is this: How do you position your content so that it is ranked higher than any duplicate content that might appear elsewhere on the Web?
First, I’d suggest that you publish your content on your own website before you publish it anywhere else, or allow someone else to publish it elsewhere. The search engines do try to find the first instance of publication and index that before indexing the duplicate content. So if you publish your articles on your own website before you publish them in other places then you stand a better chance of those articles being indexed on your own site first.
An alternative to publishing on your own site first is to only distribute unique content when producing off site content. Instead of submitting one article to 100 article directories, just submit it to one directory and write another article to submit to another directory. That will cut down on chances of your content being duplicated.
6 Responses to “Can Duplicate Content Still Get Ranked?”
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Hi,
Thanks for this it is a very useful article. I have an interesting problem. Someone who did SEO on my site submitted my content to a dozen or so article sites. As a result I saw my page ranking plummet almost overnight. Is there anything I can do?
@Dave – Thanks for reading and your comment. If you can isolate that this issue was indeed caused by the article marketing campaign completed by this SEO person, then I would start by getting a list of the sites and evaluating each and determine if each are spammy. If they are then reach out to them and ask them to remove the article and link…
Another approach could be to start a long term blended approach to link building and build highly relevant links to your site over time…
Hope this helps!
Nick
Nice article. I have been posting articles to our blog first because our web site is not set up yet to publish. From your article that may be a mistake. I should hold them all then publish on the site first with a link to them from the blog? Any comments?
Hi Sherrie – Thanks for reading and your comment. I would recommend that you have different versions of the article, one for your blog and then one version for your article marketing campaigns. I hope this helps…
Hello-
Great information since I’ve had a few people stealing articles that I’ve submitted to ezinearticles and not give me credit.
Also, wondering if anyone knows how to create this canonical URL tag?
Thanks
Hi Michelle – Thanks for the comment and question.
Here is an excellent post that explains how to create the canonical URL tag:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Hope that this helps!