What is Duplicate Content? A Quick Guide for Online Writers

When you make a living writing for the Internet, you learn quickly that there are just as many ways to get strikes against your work as there are to generate traffic to it. One of the most hotly debated topics under the general heading of "Never, Ever Do" is the idea of duplicate content.

The whole topic of duplicate content is complex, confusing, and still not understood well enough to form hard and fast rules. Starting out, we know that we want to avoid duplicate content, that search engines will penalize or just plain not list pages that they feel is a copy of writing available elsewhere online, and that these things are bad. Very, very bad.

So how do we avoid having our articles pop up as a copy of another version? First, we have to understand how most software defines duplicated content ... and then we can prevent our writing falling into that category.

Duplicate Content: The Definition

We're all professional writers, so I'll assume that we all know better than to submit someone else's work as our own. Granted, for some people, this isn't a given - but if you're taking the time to read this article, I can pretty safely assume you're not one of "them".

So. Beyond the widely-understood topic of plagiarism, where a horrible writer submits someone's work word-for-word or nearly so as their own, what defines duplicate content?

The easiest way of defining the topic is this: Separate web pages that contain nearly identical content, which may attract a penalty from search engines.

This is a problem more often than you might realize. Let's say that you've sat at home and researched your topic beforehand using books out of your bookcase. You never once hit the search engines for support. What you ended up with is an article so uniquely yours that it shouldn't be similar to anyone else's, right? Not necessarily. If you've quoted larger blocks of text from the books you researched, they might be the very same ones someone else has used. Combine this with just a few sentences that are nearly identical, and you have found yourself in the whole duplicate content zone.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't care so much how many paragraphs more or less mirror someone else's work as long as it's not been plagiarized. We don't live in a perfect world, and we certainly don't write in one. Our world is filled with search engines and their robots - little pieces of software that wander the Internet looking for new things to include in their directory. When these robots hit pages with the same content, it starts confusing them.

Licensed Duplicate Content

There are times when we would very much like to be able to offer the same article in more than one place. Sites like Associated Content actually allow for this, to an extent. From a writer's perspective, how profitable is it to bother? Not very.

If you want to offer your writing in multiple places without completely re-writing an article, you'll need to be very conscious of how this content will affect the sites using your work. Unless you're just after a quick ticket to a bad reputation, you don't want to sell your article to a second - or third - website without letting them know that it's been published elsewhere online.

From a webmaster's perspective, there are a lot of reasons to use licensed duplicate content. It works great as a "filler", and sometimes the writing is so perfect for visitors that it really can't be missed. If you really must use the content in your website, instead of linking to its original source, you'll want to take the time to add this meta tag to your html:

This tag tells a search engine's robot to ignore the content on the page. Any links you've placed in it will still carry value, and your visitors can still read the article ... but you won't have to worry about facing penalties for search engine spamming.

Avoiding Writing Duplicate Content

Leaving the whole issue of licensed duplicate content alone, how can you avoid running into problems? The answer is pretty simple: take the time to provide truly unique articles that reflect your own writer's voice and are on topics you're passionate about.

Writer's voice is a term for the actual way you write. People who read many of my articles will be able to recognize that it's "me" talking even without thinking about it - I write a particular way, because it's what's natural to me. Every writer has their own voice - you need to develop yours, and use it. Since every writer's voice is unique, we all use our words differently and phrase paragraphs in unique ways. We break up our sentences differently, and we focus on different images. This alone is enough to get you past the dupe content hurdle.

Focusing on topics that you're passionate about will send you sprinting past any problems with ease. Seriously. Having written for Associated Content for a couple years now and producing more articles for them than I would ever have thought humanly possible, I can say this with absolute certainty: focus on your passion keeps you motivated, and provides a running stream of topics that are unique.

By using these two ideas, you'll probably never run into any penalties.

Duplicate Content Penalties

Why are the people who purchase our writing so worried about where it might be found online? In a word: penalties.

Penalties in the search engine world are the equivalent of fines imposed on sports players. The severity of the "infraction" determines how serious the penalty is - and they can become very serious. For large websites like Associated Content that updates its index daily with new articles from thousands of writers, the issue isn't a laughing matter. If they were to let even fifty of its hundreds of daily submissions slip through that are duplicated heavily online, search engines could start assuming AC was abusing the system ... spamming their robots.

When even a relatively small number of articles - 100 of them - contain content from other websites, search engines start imposing penalties. The entire website can have all of the links to its pages on a search engine removed, or an entire domain can be blacklisted. Fixing the problem isn't easy, and can be a death sentence for a website.

Keeping this in mind will help you understand why the people that purchase our writing can be so strict. They have good reason to be, which means that you have even better reason to work on your voice and writing focus so that you can keep getting paid well to do what you love.