How to Beat the Duplicate Content Filter
The so-called duplicate content filter is a recent addition to all major search engine alorithms as a response to certain activities that were being used to artificially boost search engine rankings. A number of website owners were emploing a method known as "link spamming," where they would create hundreds of identical pages with links pointing to their main website in order to artificially boost their rankings. When this method was discoverd, the programming gurus that create the search engine algorithms went to work to beat it, and their solution was to ban all web pages that contain identical content except for one original version. This is called the duplicate content filter, and it chances are that if you engage in blogging, article marketing or some other form of content syndication then this filter has an effect on your business. When you submit a piece of content for syndication on differnet websites, whether it is a blog post or an article, in the eyes of the Google bot or the web robot of some other big search engine each page that your content is posted on is going to be classified as a duplicate page. Since a duplicate content filter will screen out every single identical page except for one, this means that alot of the pages that your content is posted on will not get indexed and will not show up on the search engine results pages. Now the best way that you can overcome the duplicate content filter is to write a unique article for each and every website that you submit content to, but this would be extremely time consuming and you would be glued to your computer all day and night! There is also an easier way that you can overcome this filter that is much less time consuming, and you can do it by utilizing a free tool called a duplicate content checker. By using this type of tool, instead of creating a new article for every website that you submit content to, you can copy the same article and re-write a few words and sentences until it reaches the point that a search engine robot will no longer regard it as identical content. This can be done in under five minutes, as opposed to the 30+ minutes that it may take to come up with a new original article. This tool will take two different articles and read them in much the same way that a search engine robot would, and then it will tell you the percentage by which they are considered duplicate. By knowing this, you can then alter the second article in a few minutes to the point that it is considered to be unique content, and by submitting these altered articles to directories instead of identical article then you can overcome the duplicate content penalty without spending all day doing it. A popular question that many bloggers and webmasters ask is "By what percentage do two articles need to differ in order to be considered unique?" The major search engines that devise the algorithms for dectecting duplicate content are very secretive about these kinds of numbers, so there is no crystal-clear answer. A good rule to go by would be to make sure that your article is no less than 25% unique, and ideally you would want it to be somewhere in the range of 35-50% unique.
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