Jul 29 2008
Duplicate Content Penalty - Copyright Infringement
Copyright Infringement Online
Copyright Infringement is a growing problem online. Dealing with websites who scrape your content can cause ranking problems. Google has the duplicate content penalty you must avoid at all cost. Copyscape.com provides a tool to insure you wont fall victim to content thieves. Once you input your url and hit search it will find all pages on the web that appear to be copies of the content on the url you submit.
There are a few things you can do in the event someone copies your content. First is to get in contact with the owner of the website to request they take the copied content off. After all, this duplicate content penalty is probably affecting them without them even knowing it. If the owner of the website doesn’t have any “contact us” information, you can try out whois.net to find website ownership details.
Let Search Engines Know
If contacting the owner of website doesn’t work, you can visit http://www.google.com/dmca.html to keep in the clear with Google and avoid any penalties. Yahoo’s page is http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/. The page for MSN can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtinfrg.htm
If for some reason you have duplicate contant across a set of pages on your domain, you can avoid the penalty by disallowing the copied pages in your robots.txt file. Getting internal duplicant contant can happen if you use affiliate programs for marketing your products. In these cases affiliates are often times provided with unique urls for tracking leads or sales. As more affiliates join, more unique urls with the same content are created which result in, you guessed it, a duplicate content issue. No need to index affiliate doorway pages. Even though most affiliates will not follow their links some will. To still get some of the link juice apply the noindex follow tags within the <head> section of your page code. From what I’ve seen, even though the page is not indexed, link juice will still flow through to any internal links, including your Home Page Link, found on these affiliate page.
Remember, just like people, search engines don’t like seeing the same thing over and over. It’s always a good practice to avoid duplicate conent, duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags. Providing original compelling content is a search engines best friend.
