The subject of duplicate content and, particularly, precisely how it is seen by the search engines is being hotly debated and opinions vary widely. As if this is not enough, the size of the problem as far as articles is concerned depends to some degree on whether you are publishing or writing articles. In this short article we are going to consider the problem from the publisher's perspective. There is an incredible quantity of duplicate content about today and there are obviously times when it is appropriate to make use of it. For instance, if you have a website talking about American history you may decide to include details of the Declaration of Independence and post sections of it, or indeed the contents of the whole document. Clearly here it would be inappropriate to say the least to attempt to rewrite it in order to escape a duplicate content penalty. Similarly, if you find a well written article which would be of value to your visitors then you might well feel that it is appropriate to publish it on your website. In this case the writer obviously holds the copyright to the article and will usually only permit it to be used providing it is not changed in any manner and that he is credited for the article by including his 'about the author' paragraph at the foot of the article. In both of these cases you will obviously be adding a page to your website which is going to be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and will present you with difficulties when it comes to ranking high in the search engine results. But does this matter? A large number of webmasters today have become obsessed with achieving high search engine rankings and have forgotten about the true purpose of a website which is to provide a resource for your visitors. Now, if at this point you were expecting me to say that the primary purpose of your website is to make you money then some re-thinking is needed. One problem for most webmasters is that while they wish to use their website to make money the search engines could not care less whether you make money or not (putting to one side the separate issue of their own advertising programs) and will rank pages in their search results depending upon how relevant a page is to the search term used and whether they consider that the page is going to give the searcher the information which he is looking for. Of course, if your own page is deemed relevant and placed high in the search results you will get traffic and thus make money and it is here that the secret is to be found. Your aim must be to construct a website which provides valuable content for your visitors and which is going to keep them on your website and navigating their way from page to page and is also going to have them book marking the website and coming back regularly. To a large degree this means that you have to provide fresh and unique pages regularly which you will need to write yourself or outsource to others to write for you. It is this unique and fresh content which will be picked up and indexed by the search engines to provide you with free search engine traffic. However, there are two additional things which you need to think about. First, for your website to have 'authority' and to hold your visitors' attention it will need to provide both width and depth in covering your subject and here making reference to and quoting or publishing the work of others can be very valuable. Second, despite the fact that search engines rank pages and not websites, there is little doubt that they also evaluate your website as a whole and give weight to individual site pages to some degree on their value as part of your overall website. The bottom line therefore is that, while the majority of your website needs to be composed of fresh and unique content, there is undoubtedly a role to be played by adding relevant and well written articles from other writers wherever these add weight to the overall message that your website is carrying.
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