NetCritics.info

Have you ever heard of the term duplicate content? It simply means the same written content, video and audio appearing on different websites online. Does this really affect your search engine rankings? Can it be said that in truth, you are likely to get your website banned by any of the big search engines like Google –who doesn’t want to be on their listing!- Yahoo and MSN if you use any content that has been used anywhere else online? Yes and no.

I’ll start with the first which is yes. Duplicate content can hurt your website ranking and possible get you banned if you are using the same content as gazillions of websites are. This is where contents like private label rights articles can affect your website. Your website gets banned when the search engine bots encounter the same content on many websites. At that point, it looks like spam to them. Thus, making them flag the websites.

The “No” aspect is this: Research has shown that if the same content is found on as many as 20 websites, the search engines will not suspect a thing. While this is duplicate content, the truth is it is still under the radar. Therefore, your website will never get banned nor will your search engine rankings be affected. So, now that you know this, you would have to be very careful when choosing articles for article directories to add to you website.

I personally prefer getting the less viewed articles, as they seem to less used. Then, add my recommendations and thoughts before introducing the writer and his content. If you take your time to look through article directories, you will find well thought out and well written articles that do not have a lot of readership simply because they have got a boring title or the articles just weren’t keyword rich.