You and I both understand the importance of great content, so what happens when that content suddenly becomes worthless? What to you do once you've invested in great content and then suddenly your site is slapped with a duplicate content penalty causing all those visitors (and sales) to instantly disappear.

This article explains exactly how Google and other search engines treat duplicate content allowing you to avoid having your pages dumped out of the search results. Let's start with understanding duplicate content.

Duplicate content can be considered any content on a Web page that's identical to content found on another Web page, even if both pages are located on the same site.

For example, if a job listing site has nearly identical text on pages for job searchers and pages for employers, it might experience a duplicate content issue. But the vast majority of sites have different content on each of their pages.

Here are the 3 most widely known types of duplicate content :

1. Duplicate Web Pages : These are Web pages that are identical in content to another Web page. These may include affiliate Web sites that use one particular page design and content for all affiliates as well as ecommerce sites using identical product descriptions supplied by the manufacturer. Landing pages are also at risk if they are similar to other landing pages found across the Internet.

2. Scraped Content : This is when content from another site is repackaged in such a way that it appears new and unique, but really is just a mish-mash of content originally published on other sites. This presents a major problem for search engines as blogging continues to become widespread and popular posts are widely syndicated across multiple blogs.

3. Duplicate Article Publishing : Once yo...