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The Worst Sin Of Today's Affiliate Marketing
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Duplicate Content Filter
Duplicate Content Sandbox
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Duplicate Sandbox In Action
Checking For Duplicate Content Sources
Recovering From Duplicate Penalty
The worst e-mistake you can do thesedays as an affiliate marketer,
or as a webamster, is to trigger the filters set by search engines
to catch duplicate content spammers. These filters are more
like signs of "Tresspassers will be Executed" though
hidden.
So what exactly is this duplicate content that can eradictae
your marketing efforts so easily?
Good question.
Making sense of the plethora of information available online
on this topic, we can safely say that it falls into two basic
categories.
Firstly, when a webmaster, while furnishing his website, not
only does make a template for the design but for the content
too. That is, when most or all of his pages look alike when
it comes to text, except for a little tweaking with keywords
in SEO favoring places like title, headlines, bolded text, meta
tags etc. The idea is to gain as many rankings as possible on
competitive phrases without doing much of work. And yes, there
were Aladin days when this strategy did work out.
The second, and more complicated form of duplicate content,
is when the webmaster copies content from another website, whether
authorized or unauthorized to do so. This could be in the form
of syndicated content, copying of information from the manufacturer's
website, or simply making use of the affiliate website provided
by the merchant he is associated with.
In both the cases, there are high chances of search engines
not including your pages when returning results for related
queries. Why? Simply because these search properties endeavor
to expose as much of unique and valuable content as possible.
What you are calling attention to on your page is already referenced
with same wordings somewhere else. Probably on an established
web property that even enjoys a high PageRank and authority
status to succeed your content.
For affiliate marketers, the latter case for duplicate content
is very enticing. I've seen many websites that were completely
built on syndicated content, and the webmaster was trying to
make money rotating a few banners and advertising messages here
and there. We are so accustomed to copying stuff from the merchant's
website; that the need to actually study his offerings and compare
it with other providers, in order to provide a knowledgeable
review to our visitors, gets buried too fast in the desire for
adding more pages.
But gone are the days when this actually worked. Search engines,
lead by Google, have placed strict filters on these unjust tricks.
The penalty is not a complete ban of your website, but of ignoring
all those pages where the copied text exceeds the defined threshold
level in ranking algorithm.
Duplicate
Content In Action:
Wanna see this "Ignoring Behavior" in action?
 Here's
a screenshot of Google's results for MEM-ASP-64M, a cisco approved
memory part. The listing in the middle doesn't have its proper
title tag, nor does it have a cached version like the others.
Most likely these pages are considered by Google to be of duplicate
nature and will rank low. Infact they won't even come up when
we search for highly competitive keywords. Try searching on
google for "site:yourdomain.com" and if some of the results
from your website are listed like this, you better analyze their
content.
Checking
For Duplicate Content:
If you are wondering what exactly in your pages is the trouble
making copied text probably taken from other sources, CopyScape.com
offers a valuable tool. At this website you can simply enter
the URL for webpage you would like to check and after a thorough
scanning service, CopyScape will deliver the matches for identical
content and where exactly are they located on the Internet.
How
To Recover:
Recovering from duplicate content penalty requires an uphill
struggle BUT afterall it's possible and worth the extra effort.
The penalty is not for the lifetime of your website.
Start-off by placing some original content on your website.
Add information rich new pages, revise the old ones to get rid
of all duplicate stuff and delete where revision is too time
consuming. If there's really some valuable content that you
would like to copy, place it as an image and provide a link
back to the original source.
New pages that you add will take less time to bring some of
the traffic back. Old pages will not only take a longer route
to search engines results pages, but also that sometimes they
won't regain the superb rankings they had.
The way search engine industry is headed to in terms of web
wide information clean-up, it leaves you with no other option
but to write original content for whatever you are trying to
promote. That's one more reason to download the free NetWriting
Masters Course that can actually teach you how to build
quality content.
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