Duplicate content can be a serious issue for any website owner. If content that appears on your site can be found elsewhere, it can negatively affect your credibility, tarnish your reputation and also lead to a search engine penalty. That’s not all. The website hosting duplicated content can be sued for breach of copyright, whether or not its owner was aware that the content was ripped off from other sources.

Sometimes duplicate webpage content exists not because of deliberate copying, but due to technical reasons. This can still harm your site because it confuses search engines that are then forced to choose between the original and the copy.

Take this simple example. If, in your effort to make your site more user friendly, you installed printer versions of all web pages, then the search bots will have to select between the printer version and the original HTML page. Similarly, if a site sells items online and displays the same page through different URLs, then there is a risk of content duplication. Or rather, the search bots will "see" these pages as duplicates.

Preventing Accidental Content Duplication Issues

This is a very simple to do. First, don’t let the site with duplicate content be listed in search engine rankings—that is if the content has been accidentally duplicated from your own site or you want people to read the content but are not looking for it to add to your page rank.

Second, use popularly accepted and standardized domain URLs. Search engines get confused when there is a deviation from the standard formats. The standard URLs should be used on the site whose content you want to be searchable.

Use backlinks in case you duplicated your own content by providing multiple URLs for same content or putting identical content on other sites.

The tips given above help you when the content from your own site is duplicated or when you duplicate from another source without meaning to rip off copyrighted material. There are, however, instances where other websites can rip off content from your site and display them on their own sites. Dealing with this type of a duplicate content issue can be a bit harder.

Duplication By Another Party

Google advises website owners to not worry too much about content that’s duplicated from their site. The search engines automatically filter out rogue sites from their searches. In case the offense is repeated or carried out on a larger scale, you can approach Google with an application for removing the rogue site from search indexes.

It is not really known how much content must be duplicated before search engines remove these pages from being indexed. However, they are getting better with each passing day at identifying and penalizing duplicates. Therefore, if you are using content from other sites on your pages, make sure you have full rights to it or have modified the content suitably to avoid claims of plagiarism.