Handling Duplicate Content - Scraped Content
(Page 3 of 4 )
You content may be stolen or scraped by spammers, especially as your site gets bigger. Be sure to provide backlinks within your content to your other pages in order to get credit and links.
Spotting Stolen Content
To find out if your content was stolen, use Copyscape. It costs $0.05 per search. Copyscape is in partnership with Google. What can you do when you spot a stolen article or articles? In reality, not much. You can report content theft to Google and wait for action, or contact the webmaster directly. If the article is located on a spam farm wrapped around AdSense, don't expect to get a response.
If the site is decent, ask them to remove the article, with a mild threat of a lawsuit or exclusion from search results. Though going to court because of a few articles is not worth it, it's a good scare tactic.
Printer Pages
User pages and printer-friendly pages are considered duplicate content. Though search engines have gotten smarter and can spot the difference, it's better to block printer versions in robot.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: example.come/page1/printer.html
User Feedback and User Reviews
It's very expensive and time consuming to write unique descriptions for thousands of products and keep up a flow of descriptions for new items.
You can use user feedback and reviews as unique content to avoid writing descriptions for all items. On the down side, you have to implement separate technology, which costs money, and once implemented, not all items will have reviews. Usually only the most popular items will receive reviews. It's also a challenge to entice people to review something.
Next: Dynamic Pages >>
More Search Optimization Articles
More By Ivan Strouchliak
