Save Hours Every Week By Using a Duplicate Content Checker

By Andrew Shiveley

One of the more recent additions to the popular search engine algorithms is the duplicate content filter, which will eliminate all but one copy of a web page that contains identical content.

Many people call this a duplicate content penalty, but the word "penalty" is a bit of a misnomer in this instance. A penalty would imply that the ranking of your web page is simply bumped down in the search engine results and given a lower relevancy score, but this is not actually what happens. A duplicate content page is not just penalized but is completely eliminated from the search engine results, so using the term "filter" instead of penalty when describing duplicate content is much more accurate.

One of the many tools that bloggers and webmasters have access to is a duplicate content checker, and the topic of this article is how you can use a duplicate content checker to make sure that you can overcome the filter enacted by search engines, while you are also saving loads of time every week by not having to create a unique article from scratch every time you want to syndicate your content.

A popular business model that many webmasters and bloggers use is to write an article or a post and put it on their own website, and then take this same post and submit it to syndication feeds and article directories for increased exposure. Now you may not know it, but if you are doing this then you may not be increasing the exposure of your website by as much as you think.

Remember that the duplicate content filter will find a copy of a web page that it determines to be an original, which this is determined by which page is indexed first along with a few other factors such as the relevancy of the domain name, and then it will filter out all other pages with the same content. (Each major search engine keeps the exact methods that they use a secret, but there are a few common factors that remain the same with each one.)

So let's say that you write a detailed article on your website, and then you take this same article and submit it to article directories for syndication in order to increase your exposure. Well it will not be very long before Google, Yahoo, and other search engines find your article, and they will need to determine which page that contains this article is the original.

If your article is going out for syndication, there is a chance that a few of the big websites that are an authority in your industry will pick up this article and put it on their website. A website like this has a lot of link strength and typically has a relevant domain name, and there is a good chance that it will be more popular than your own website. So if the search engines find the copy of your article on this authority site before they find it on your site (combined with the link strength and Pagerank that authority sites tend to have), the search engines may brand the article on the other website as the original instead of your website.

It goes without saying that this is undesirable, because even if somebody were to search for the exact title of your article then they would be directed to your competitor's website instead of your own. A good way to make sure that this does not happen to you is to use a duplicate content checker and slightly re-write your article before you submit it for syndication so that it is not an identical copy.

A duplicate content checker will compare two articles side-by-side to determine by what percentage they differ, and if you are using this model of submitting the same articles that you put on your website then it would probably be a good idea to make sure that the version you submit is over 30% different. Using this type of tool will save you a lot of time because instead of spending 50 minutes coming up with a brand new article, you can spend only around 5 minutes to re-write your article and make sure that it is not considered a duplicate.

A tool like this will also display a few other key figures about your article such as keyword density which will allow you to make sure that your articles are optimized for certain search terms while still remaining readable and coherent.

Article Source: http://www.articlehighlight.com

You can find a good duplicate content checker at Coach-Tyler.com/dupchecker, which will allow you to create unique content with minimum effort so that you can overcome the duplicate content filter.