Ways Publishers Can Handle The Mounting Challenge Of Duplicate Content

Using articles from article directories sites is a very simple to get content for your website but are you going to run into difficulty for publishing duplicate content?

The use of duplicate content and, especially, just how it is seen by the search engines is a hot topic of debate and opinions vary widely. As if this were not enough in itself, the size of the problem as far as articles is concerned is to a certain degree on whether you are a publisher or a writer. Here in this brief article we are going to consider the problem from the perspective of the publisher.

There is an incredible quantity of duplicate content floating about now and there are clearly times when it is correct to make use of it. For example, if you operate a site talking about American history you could decide to provide your visitors with details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or indeed the text of the whole document. Clearly here it would be out of the question 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 may well feel that it is right to put it on your site. Here the writer clearly owns the copyright to the article and will usually only permit its use providing it is not edited in any way and that he is credited for your use of the article by including his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article.

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

A large number of webmasters now have become obsessed with gaining good search engine rankings and have lost sight of the true purpose of a site which is to provide a resource for your visitors. If at this point you are expecting me to say that the objective of your site is to make you money then some re-thinking is needed.

One problem for a lot of webmasters is that while they wish to use their site to make money the search engines are not concerned with whether or not you make money (putting to one side the separate subject of their own in-house search advertising programs) and will rank pages in the search results according to how relevant each page is to the search being performed and whether they think that the page is going to provide the searcher with the information required.

Naturally, if your page is seen as relevant and placed highly in the search results you will receive traffic and therefore make money and herein lies the secret.

Your objective should be to construct a site that provides valuable content for your audience and that is going to keep them on your site and navigating their way from page to page and is also going to have them book marking the site and returning regularly.

To a large degree this means that you need to provide fresh and unique content on a regular basis which you will have to write yourself or hire other people to write for you. It is this fresh and unique content that will be picked up by the search engines and indexed to bring you your free search engine traffic. However, there are two additional things that you will need to think about.

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

Second, although the search engines rank pages rather than sites, there is no doubt that they also evaluate your site as a whole and give credit to your individual pages to a certain degree on their value as a part of your overall site.

The bottom line is that, while the greater part of your site needs to be composed of fresh and unique content, there is undoubtedly a part to be played by incorporating relevant and well written articles from other writers when these add weight to the message that your site is carrying.

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