Original Content vs Duplicate Content

Original content on web pages is essential, otherwise the site page rank and search engine results will suffer due to duplicate content penalties. In the blogging world, many bloggers prefer to reproduce authoritative articles from other sites in order to supply constant content for their own blogs. Most will include the originator's search box, and that can produce extra backlinks to the author's site. Less reputable blogs use a technique called 'scraping' where they cream off other people's blog content - minus the links and illustrations - and pass the results off as their own.
Most of these site building programs exist to scrape content from other sites so it can be reused to make someone else money. The majority of them encourage people to build trashy looking sites that have no real value.

If I sound bitter over scraping, that's because a close colleague has been on the receiving end of web plagiarism ...

I certainly prefer to take the quality approach when building web pages and writing blog posts. Writing keyword rich, optimised content is reasonably simple and it respects the reader by providing them with good content and encouraging them to return. It also attracts the search engines, that is why this blog achieved Page Rank 4 in its first seven weeks.

So why does anyone bother setting up blogs that use duplicate content? More later ...


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