FIGURE 12-1
Google uses a Similar Pages link to group web sites with related content.First, you need to understand that not all duplicate content is the same kind. You need to appreci-
ate some differences. Reprints:This is duplicate content published on multiple sites with the permission of the
copyright holder. These are the articles that you or others create and then distribute to
create links back to your site or to sites that are relevant to the content of yours. Reprints
are not bad duplicate content, but they can get your site thrown into the realm of Similar
Pages, which means they’ll be buried behind other results.
Site Mirroring:This is the kind of duplication that can cause one or more of your sites
to be delisted from a search engine. Site mirroringis literally keeping exact copies of your
web site in two different places on the Internet. Web sites used to practice site mirroring
all the time as a way to avoid downtime when one site crashed. These days, server capa-
bilities are such that site mirroring isn’t as necessary as it once was, and search engines
now “dis-include” mirrored content because of the spamming implications it can have.
Spammers have been known to mirror sites to create a false Internetfor the purpose of
stealing user names, passwords, account numbers, and other personal information.
Content Scraping:Content scraping is taking the content from one site and reusing it
on another site with nothing more than cosmetic changes. This is another tactic used by
spammers, and it’s also often a source of copyright infringement.
Same Site Duplication:If you duplicate content across your own web site, you could
also be penalized for duplicate content. This becomes especially troublesome with blogs,
because there is often a full blog post on the main page and then an archived blog post
on another page of your site. This type of duplication can be managed by simply using a
partial post, called a snippet, that links to the full post in a single place on your web site.Google groups pages with similar content.182
Part II SEO Strategies
75002c12.qxd:Layout 1 11/7/07 9:41 AM Page 182