Everyone agrees that search engines have built-in mechanisms to identify duplicate content. But the idea that most do not grasp is why you should avoid duplicate content on your site? Today, it is increasingly difficult to avoid duplicate content because it does not happen intentionally for many site owners. Typically, it happens because blog themes are poorly designed in relation to how content is distributed. In this article, however, we are going to discuss specifically why you should avoid duplicate content on your site. In the next article, we will show you ways to prevent duplicate content from appearing on your WP site.

Spam - Duplicate content is most commonly seen as spamming. When webmasters realized that they could “play or dupe” the search engines with thousands and thousands of pages through a technique called “mod_rewrite”, they just spammed the internet with the same content. They used it as a way to monopolize the top ranking positions, thus ensuring people came to their websites. Obviously, there were no user benefits in the pages. There was no substance or value for visitors. Now search engines are continually looking for duplicate content in order to stamp out spamming.

Poor Earnings or Commissions – Along the same lines as spamming, webmasters found that the more pages they had, the more money they could make from the same content. Of course, their ROI was high because they never had to develop the sites. And when pay-per-view commissions were the rage with companies paying webmasters every time a banner was seen, duplicate content was the norm. Nowadays, webmasters would not even be accepted into any network with excessive duplicate content.

Angy Users – If you own a hobby site that is important to you, or you earn your living from one website or many, duplicate content is not going to make your visitors very happy. If they have to read the same thing over and over on different pages, they will eventually give up and leave your site permanently. This defeats the purpose of owing a website, if you have no readers.

Banned or Filtered by Search Engines – Another “technique” that webmasters tried was duplicate websites. Once they hit on a successful topic or niche, they just made clones. The only thing that changed was the domain name and sometimes the color or graphics. They might have even housed the sites on different servers, but the search engines read text, so the sites were flagged. Typically sites that are clones of others or sites that engage in excessive duplicate content will invariably be removed or filtered from the search engine results. Nowadays, they might not even make it to the results pages.

As you have probably now surmised, duplicate content on the same website is a serious issue. It is one that should not be taken lightly when building websites and using themes that perpetuate problems. Understanding why you should avoid duplicate content is the key to fixing the problem and preventing duplicate content from happening.

There was a time when search engines used to penalize webmasters for promoting duplicate content (within the same website). While some administrators did it knowingly (with the very intention of increasing the page ranking), the others had to post duplicate content because they had to. For the sake of illustration, consider that you wish to make a web page printable. You will have to develop two web pages with the same content – but only one among them will be printable!

In the earlier example, with the help of the robots.txt file you can instruct the search engine bots to skip indexing the printable page. Bear in mind that this is just another instance with the help of which you can understand the true importance of the robots.txt file. Plenty of websites contain confidential data, and it is a smart practice to keep them away from search engine bots. Once indexed, it is tough to flush them off. Webmasters often employ the same robots.txt file to choose the web pages that the search engine must index.

One must realize that robots.txt is a text file (and not a HTML file as considered by many). Is it essential to keep a robots.txt file for a website? Well, it is smarter to proceed according to the situation at hand. Search engine bots “crawl” the entire website in the absence of this text file. Many SEO professionals often argue that these files are not at all mandatory for a website. However, by tweaking this simple text file, you can increase the page ranking of your website by a huge margin, according to SEO Tutorial.net.

It is important to place the robots.txt file in the appropriate folder. The same text file must be present on the main directory. Creating a robots.txt file is not an easy task. The syntax might be confusing. If you are finding it difficult, you can employ diverse kinds of tools that will create and validate the text file. With these online software solutions, you just need to point and click at the folders to be excluded. Sample tutorials are already present on the internet. An effective robots.txt file can augment the search engine friendly nature of a website. Optimizing a website for search engines is all about experimenting with sitemap, link building and even robots.txt file.

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When trying to gage the important of back links in SEO, it is smart to keep in mind which search engine you are competing in. Google counts back links much more than MSN, although both take them into account. Back links are links that are directed towards your website. The number of back links that your website has depends upon its popularity. Back links go hand in hand with search engine optimization; Google especially gives credit to the websites that receive a good number of back links from a variety of different websites.

Remember that just simply having back links isn’t as effective as having quality back links. There are two aspects to think about when figuring out if you have quality back links. One is if the keywords put in your anchor text that goes directly back to your site for which you are trying to optimize. The second is making sure the website that links back has the same theme as your website. This will then make the websites more relevant than other websites in the same search. Back links are important to SEO because as you build up back links, you are boosting up your website and have a greater chance of getting indexed faster. Not only does it help with the short term, but in the long run, it also helps to increase the traffic to your site.

Search engines now are very keen for websites that actually take the time to build up quality back links, over an extended period of time. It is quite easy to get your web page up in rankings however, when it comes to search engines, you can’t fool them with inbound links from other sites. Trying to cheat with the quality back links to the search engine will get your site sandbox, which can take weeks to months to resurrect it back to its reigning position. Building up quality links is a very time consuming task and requires a lot on your part. Back links potentially determine the fate of your website and it can either be a complete dud or a huge success.

If you are unsure how to obtain quality back links or simply want it done the best possible way, hire professionals. Yes there are professionals that help you gain back links as well as help out with other aspects of both your on page and off page SEO. There are such things called SEO traffic spiders which are professionals who deal with indexing, optimization – on page/off page, SEO copywriting, linking, etc. They help you to maximize your website in all aspects that they can, especially in the task of increasing your back links.

With a long term plan set towards reaching your SEO goals, it can be a easy task to start, but not finish. Remember that the links have to look natural, and as such have to be done over time. Throwing a thousand links one day and none for the rest of the month does not shine well on your venture. Take this chance to guarantee long term success with SEO.

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So how does your web hosting selection affect your SEO? It really doesn’t come down to the web hosting company as much as the hosting plan you choose. Any host that provides shared servers for customers has the ability to negatively affect your SEO. This cheap and normally capable type of hosting is a regular choice for up and coming webmasters. The main problems arise when certain users of the same server start to do things that are frowned upon by the big search engines.

Individuals that spam email, recklessly accumulate links, promote certain material such as adult related, and a variety of other actions can black list an entire server or IP. Cheaper plans seem to attract these types of activities, so be weary of overly cheap plans. Check and make sure that your web host does not accept any adult type websites, or any of the actions stated above. Then research if the web host has had past problems with these issues. The better the web host’s security, the greater the chance that your web host will not negatively affect your ranking.

A problem that can arise from choosing the wrong host is that the company’s server IP address can possibly become on the spam list and become part of a black hat technique. With such behavior, Google will penalize you, so why bother taking the risk when you can do things right the first time? To achieve greater security, it is pertinent to upgrade to a better hosting plan. Virtual private servers are the first step up, and really lower the amount of users sharing the responsibility of playing it straight. This instantly minimizes the chances of being affected by the other users, simply because they have more invested and are less in number.

The most secure choice when SEO is taken into account would be a dedicated server to host with. When you rent your own server, accountability rests in your own hands. Expensive, yes, but definitely the best end choice. If you are still not in need of dedicated hosting, there are a number of things you can do to help increase your SEO.

Add additional IP addresses to your current account to start. By mixing in new IP addresses after every three or so new websites, you minimize the likelihood of having your linking practices adapted to. Many webmasters interlink their websites to maximize SEO. While these related niche back links seems like a good idea, if they are all from the same IP address, it just will not have the same effect. Through dedicated research, and long term strategy adherence to this strategy, you can get the most out of your web hosting choice.