What Constitutes Duplicate Content And Should We Be Worried About It?

The argument about exactly how duplicate content is defined and whether or not duplicate content is a problem has been underway for some time now and shows no sign of dying down. So exactly how is duplicate content defined and does it really matter?

The widely and generally accepted view is that duplicate content indeed matters and, though one prominent search engine optimization expert recently wrote an article opposing this view, even a cursory trawl through the mountain of material which has been published on this topic recently will clearly indicate that this is very much a minority view.

However, if we accept the view that duplicate content does really matter, then just how do we define duplicate content? For instance, if I create an original article for an article directory and then re-work that same article for submission to a second article directory how are the search engines going to analyze my two articles and decide whether or not they contain duplicate content? The truth is that we don't know, however, here are one webmaster's thoughts.

When checking for duplicate content was initially carried out by the search engines it was very much a matter of comparing one web page in its entirety with another and there was no attempt to begin to dissect the pages and compare individual page elements. In those days it was possible to take identical content and just add an introduction and conclusion to one of the pages to escape the attention of the duplicate content filters. Sadly for many webmasters those days are now a distant memory.

Nowadays, the search engines dissect the two pages to permit them to look at individual elements and here is the core of the present disagreement. Most people agree that attention is focused upon the main content of a page rather than the structure of the page. The majority of website designers make use of templates when creating their pages which define the structure of each page including such things as headers, footers and navigation menus. This is widely considered to be acceptable and the search engines do not see this as duplicate content. What the search engines are concerned about is the informational content that is contained in the body of the page. But just how do they check this page content?

Some people contend that this checking is undertaken at 'block' level (examining individual sentences or paragraphs), but others believe that filtering searches for phrases or possibly even individual words. Noone really knows the answer although it might seem reasonable to conclude that the most likely basis for comparison would be to make use of either sentence or phrase matching.

Sentence matching is relatively straightforward and simply involves cutting both pages up into chunks using the page's punctuation. Take a look, for instance, this sentence:

It is quite simple to find a good deal on a cell phone, providing you know where to shop.

This would be seen as either a single sentence or as two sentences, depending on whether or not you use the time honored definition of a full-stop as indicating the end of a sentence or adopt an elastic approach and make use of other punctuation marks, like commas.

Phrase matching is a little more difficult. What is the definition of a phrase? Should it be 2 or 3 or 4 or 20 words?

Just for the moment let us assume that we are going to define a phrase as 3 words. In this case the phrases below would be classed as duplicate content if they appeared on two pages which were being examined:

At that time
You can get
In those days
In the end
One way to
The answer is

These five phrases are all typical everyday phrases that could be used on pages about horse riding, learning to play bridge, football or anything else you care to mention. Now there are a few people who contend that the search engines do compare pages at this level. For instance, when I questioned the support staff for one popular duplicate checker (Dupecop) about the basis on which they checked for duplicate content they said:

"DupeCop compares both individual words and 3-word phrases. It also ignores all punctuation and scans across sentences"

It was no surprise therefore that when I checked several articles using their system guess is as good as mine.

Over the years I have written and published literally hundreds of articles and have closely watched the results for signs of duplicate content penalties, as far as it is possible for any of us to do so. Upon the basis of my own experience I would say that filtering is not conducted clear down to the level of short phrases but stops at the sentence level. Accordingly, providing you alter content down to sentence level, you ought to have no problem in escaping the content filters. In actual fact, even if one or two of sentences are duplicated you should be fine.

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