Search Engines and Duplicate Content

Plagiarism, which is nothing but copied content, produces
duplicate content between two websites. It is well known that
search engines are adverse to duplicate or identical content
and that page rankings can suffer because of plagiarism. Google
has guidelines against plagiarism and warns website owners
against creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with
substantially duplicate content, as stated in its Webmaster
Guidelines. Having even a substantially duplicate content, much
more a totally duplicate website, will penalize a websites' page
rank.

In addition to having the page rank penalized, the website
containing plagiarized work or duplicate content can even be
affected so much so that it won't even make it to the search
results listing. This happens because web crawlers, in an
effort to be more efficient, do not crawl duplicate and
near-duplicate sites that they have determined in their
previous crawl. Because of this, duplicate sites do not even
get indexed by the web crawlers, and so are not listed in the
results page. In Google, mirrored sites are delegated to the
link at the bottom of the results page which says "Similar
Results have been omitted…"

Higher Ranking for Plagiarists' Websites

The problem, however, lies when search engines instead of
penalizing plagiarists end up penalizing the website that
actually wrote the original content. Website owners of original
content oftentimes find that websites who have copied their
content are given a better page rank by search engines.

Why Plagiarists Get a Higher Page Rank

This problem of being ranked lower than plagiarists' site
happens mainly since Google and other search engines algorithms
are unable to distinguish between the original and the duplicate
or copied content in their index. Although it is true that
search engines in general are adverse to identical content,
since there is currently no way for the search engines to know
which content is original, website owners of the original
content oftentimes find that their site actually gets a lower
ranking than a plagiarists' site. Hence website owners of
original content are the one that sometimes get penalized for
plagiarism.

Also, plagiarists, who are driven by profit use other SEO
techniques that drive their page rank much higher. Hence,
website owners with original content but without very good
optimization techniques often find themselves ranked lower than
content "borrowers". This is of course a serious issue for
website owners, especially business websites whose revenue gets
affected by the lower page rank.

One way that search engines address the issue of duplicate
content is by assigning priority for the content of the website
that was indexed first. By rule of seniority, the first site
that posts the content should be the site that contains the
original content. This works most of the time but breaks down
when plagiarists copy the content quite fast so that crawlers
sometimes do index the copied site before the original one.
When this happens the site with the copied content gets
priority over that of the original content. To avoid this, some
website owners use the Sitemaps system to submit their articles
or other fresh content to Google. This ensures that the
submitted content will be known to Google as the original and
not the copy.

Fighting Plagiarism and its Effect on Your Page Rank

Plagiarism has been an issue long before the World Wide Web was
created. The creation of the Internet has made it easier and
more lucrative for plagiarists to copy content and pass it off
as their own without any regard to copyright laws. As mentioned
earlier it is a serious threat to business owners and at the
very least is a source of irritation to bloggers whose posts or
articles oftentimes get ripped off. Because of this, while most
companies do their best to fight plagiarists many individuals
find themselves losing heart. The fight against plagiarism
seems to be a losing battle, especially to those who have no
idea in countering plagiarism.

The first thing website owners can do is to find out in the
first place if their site has been plagiarized. A good way to
do this is by using Copyscape. Copyscape lets website owners
enter their web pages' URL and then proceeds to scan other
websites and notify the user for very close matches in content.
Using the standard Google search also works. Simply copy a short
paragraph from your webpage and paste it in Google's search box
to come up with all the other websites that contain the same or
similar information.

In case your content has been copied the next best step to take
is to make a copy of the copied page(s) and then send an email
to the website requesting them to remove the copied material or
at least for a back link and proper crediting of the work,
depending on your objective. In case the website owner or
administrator doesn't reply at all or in a favorable manner,
the next step to take is to contact the web hosting company
they are using. Inform them that the site that they are
currently hosting is infringing copyright and that they have a
responsibility legally to regulate such sites. This could lead
them to pressure the site to remove the copied content.
However, this tack doesn't always work. When this happens it is
time to take a more legal action and contact your lawyer.
According to an advice given by Roy Sumatra, in case your web
page rank is affected by the copied website do contact the
search engines wherein your page rank is affected. Google is
aggressive and serious in dealing with infringement issues and
has guidelines for dealing with infringement of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act.

For those who want to prevent the hassle of being penalized as
the copier of your own original content, as mentioned earlier,
it is best to submit your content to through the Sitemaps
system. By using the system, the content is submitted directly
to Google and indexed by them automatically so that the content
will be known as the original one and be given priority in case
of plagiarism.


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