Web Development Magazine

How to avoid Google Duplicate Content

All webmasters believe that duplicate content is caused by coping other articles posting someone feeds on your site. It definitely is the true but i have few my own views on this that i want to share with you.

I will start with spotting duplicate content, this is very easy all you need to do is make a query on Google like that one:

site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf

Where of course you need to replace yoursite.com with your real website URL. Note how many results Google returned after this question if none then great you have 0 pages in supplemental index. But if Google will return number of results grater then 0 then you must do another query on Google:

site:www.yoursite.com

Now divide number of pages in supplemental index (SI) by total number of results. This is how you get your supplemental index ratio. If you multiple it by 100 then you will know percent of your pages in SI.

What ratio is good and which is bad? It is hard to tell but everything above 50% is bad, but this is just my opinion.

You may ask what does Supplemental Index has to do with Duplicate Content? In fact it has very much to do. Pages in Supplemental are those that really are not worth indexing by Google. The ones that are not worth indexing are pages which are already in Google index, but in my opinion it is just a part of the story. Google also puts in SI pages with small amount of content, like 1 sentence page, it isn’t very informative isn’t it?

If you do not agree then look at this example.

If i would great a website with a single article which will contain one sentence like: “I hate iPhones.” would it be quality content? Would it deserve a better place in search engines then 1000 words iPhones review? Of course not.

So i guess low quality content, which basically means very small number of words used in your article can throw you into Supplemental Index, which not necessary means duplicate content, but when it comes to SERPS it is all the same.

The bottom line is if you want to stay out of supplemental index box then try to keep your articles or posts long at least tree hundreds words and informative at the same time. You will benefit in two ways of it: first search engines will like, but more important is second benefit – your visitors will like you .

Anyway duplicate content or Supplemental Index isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you, if you will get enough of other pages linking to you then you still can be #1 in Google SERPs for certain keyword, but still it is much easier to write an article to get people linking to it.