One of the most common rookie mistakes made by Internet business owners can be a fatal blow. It can even trigger the tragedy known as site death.Duplicate content can affect just about every website on the Internet and the scary part is that you probably aren’t even aware of it. Affiliate marketing web sites are at higher risk than others for having duplicate content.

It is a common rookie mistake because it is so easy to do, so let’s take a look at what constitutes duplicate content, how to avoid it and most importantly, how to clean up the mess when you discover it.

What is Duplicate Content?
For our purposes, duplicate content refers to text on your website that a search engine spider can read - in other words, it doesn’t refer to images, only to the text that someone could select, copy and paste. The dangerous duplicate content is when a search engine robot believes that the content on pages within your website are so similar that they don’t need to be indexed.

That means they aren’t being rated, and that they aren’t eligible for ranking in keyword searches.

Ouch!

Now before I continue I want to make sure that you aren’t making a second rookie mistake by making every page on your web site look completely different. Site templates make it much easier to create and maintain web sites, especially important as your site grows. The template itself is not considered your site’s content, at least not to a human. This is an important distinguishing factor.

NOTE: A template is made up of the header, side panels and footer, and the content section is the middle or main portion of your pages.

How do you change your content enough to make it rankable?
First, you need to figure out roughly how many words the search engine computers are seeing. You can accomplish this with a copy-and-paste job into Microsoft Word and using the Word Count feature. When you try this, be sure to delete all of the stuff in the main section of the pasted page. This word count is a very important step in the process, so I’ll call it our target number.

Now that you have a target number, you have all the basic information you need to ensure that your pages are not considered duplicate content by the search engine robots. In a nutshell, the biggest problem we’re addressing here is what the search engine sees, right? All you have to do to avoid duplicate content death is to ensure that the number of words in your content sections outnumbers the words in your template.

Once you have completed this process, your page ranking should increase rather quickly. If it doesn’t, then you will probably need to take a look at your page titles - if they are duplicated, then you have another problem on your hands, and since that particular issue will require a bit of knowledge of HTML coding, I’ll cover that at another time.

Michael Nolan
IM Rookie Contributing Writer

Find more internet marketing tips at IMRookie.com

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