How to avoid duplicate content

1. Do not steal content from other sites.

First, stolen content adds no value to your site. Besides, this deceitful practice may harm your search engine rankings and result in your site being banned for malicious duplicate content and copyright infringement. To avoid these problems, make sure to create unique and original content. If possible, do your best to follow your sites’ overall theme – this will help you become an authoritative Web resource within your niche.

2. Check if you accidentally use duplicate content on your site.

When the site grows large, things may go out of control and you may find yourself repeating the things you’ve already said. To avoid this problem, you can check the pages across your site for duplicate content. If you have found any – alter the pages to make each of them as unique as possible.

3. Check if anybody is scraping your content.

There are a number of free duplicate content checkers available online. For example, you can use the Copyscape tool to search for copies of your page on the Internet.
In case you see that someone steals content from you, you can report abuse to the search engines: file a DMCA infringement request with Google, with Yahoo!, and with MSN. The other step is to file legal suit (or threaten such) against the website in question, as it can take months before your DMCA motions go into effect.

4. If you use articles on your site, check if they have been distributed all over the Internet.

Again, use a duplicate content checker and check if your articles are posted anywhere except your site. If you do find copies of your article on the Web, take steps to avoid duplicate content issues. First, make changes to each reposted article in order to make it unique. Also, make sure your articles are relevant to your overall site theme, as large websites which aggregate a lot of content on the same topic may outrank your site for your keywords and key phrases.

5. If you publish the same post on the blog syndication website and on your blog, include a link back to your own site.

This will do in case your own site has already gained good link popularity, and you run no risk of being outranked by the blog syndication website. If you feel that your site is smaller and “weaker” in terms of SE positioning, make your article look different in two different locations. To accomplish this, you can rewrite the article, or use blog widgets to make the overall page look and sound different. For example, WordPress, Diachronics and many other blog platforms allow you to add various widgets that further alter the page content that can be indexed. Each page of your personal blog may contain more customizable information like menu systems and categories along with static text that, again, alter the overall indexable content of the site.

6. If you run several websites with identical content and promote them through different channels (e.g., one with the help of PPC campaigns and another one – through organic SE rankings) make sure to tell Google which domain you prefer to be indexed.

To do so, go to Google Webmaster Tools and include the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file.

7. If you have multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content, consider blocking duplicate pages from indexing.

For example, if you don’t want search engines to index the printer versions of your site’s articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular expressions in your robots.txt file.

8. If you participate in an affiliate program, add value to your affiliate site.

Rewrite product descriptions instead of using ready-made templates offered by the original merchant. Also, create additional pieces of unique and relevant content (tips, news, how-to articles, etc.) to make your site more useful and attractive to both users and search engines.

9. If you target multiple countries, consider creating different content for each domain.

If your site is translated into different languages and you run several domains for each site copy, in most cases search engines will consider these domains as sites with different content. However if you run several domains with identical content in English to market USA, Canada, Great Britain and Australia – do your best to alter content on each site to make these four sites feature different content.