Duplicate Content: The Other Side of SEO

If you are at least a bit aware of SEO, you know that Google penalizes the site's position in search results when it determines that content has been taken from other sites. The higher positions in search engines your site has, the bigger are the odds that the content from your site will be stolen. The reason is simple. High position ranking in search engines increases your site’s visibility on the web. From one side, this is good because your site draws more direct traffic. However, the direct traffic is not always beneficial, for example, when your site is visited by “enemies”, Internet frauds, willing to steal your great ideas.

Why do people steal content?

The most common reason for fraud of such a kind is somebody else’s eagerness to promote their own websites at the cost of somebody else’s hard work. They select your site among other sites in top ten Google results, visit your site, see that it contains interesting and quality content, and want to have the same. They simply duplicate the content from your site and place it on their own website without any changes. The worst variant is when they steal not only the content, but also the layout and design, and also try to duplicate the logo of your company so that it visually looks and sounds the same. Why do something on your own, if everything is already done and is freely available in cyberspace! This is the philosophy of frauds. However, such actions do not bring anything good either to the stealer or to the owner of the original source of content…

The consequences of content duplication: for those who steal and for those from whom it is stolen

The first sign that your content has been stolen is sudden slippage of your positions in Google search results. Since Google doesn't want multiple copies of the same content cluttering their results pages, the system devalues all but one of the copies of the content based on the age of the page. However, even if your domain name is pretty old, you site may be devaluated as well, for example, if the content was stolen and placed on a more trusted web site domain. In this case Google may think that it is you who have stolen the content rather than it has been stolen from you. Also, keep track of the so called “clone” sites appearing on the web – sites with the same design and idea and stolen content. If there are many sites containing your content, the result might be pretty devastating for both, the original and duplicated resources.

How to check for duplicate content

A web master should regularly take some time and check the site for duplicate content. Lucky for us, we have a good resource for monitoring such things. If you suspect that someone has stolen content from your web resource, go to www.copyscape.com, enter the URL of the page you want to check, and get a list of pages in the Google index that contain text also present on your site. For more detail you can subscribe to their Copysentry service.

What to do if you spotted your content on another web resource?

If you have some concerns that someone has duplicated your content, write to the website owner who has published your content requesting they remove the duplicated text. To add more weight to your request, mention that you will report the matter to Google under their DMCA guidelines. If no measures are taken from their side, report the duplicate content issue to Google under the DMCA guidelines they provide at http://www.google.com/dmca.html. If nothing else helps, change your text so that it bears no similarity with the duplicated copy or write a better copy. In case with web design and brand fraud, the only way out, if nothing else helps, is complete redesign of your site and filling it with fresh content.

Translation Issues

I have been involved in some translation activity recently and I got very interested in such issue in the translation process as REQUIREMENTS OF THE CUSTOMER. Does the translator have to take into consideration the requirements of the customer if they sometimes interfere with the QUALITY of translation.

The problem is that we (the customer and the translator) being on different sides of the fence, have a different vision as to the quality of the translated material. Why? Because what the customer often means by the quality translated stuff is the stuff translated WORD FOR WORD – the stuff where there is place for grammar transformations, add-ons and omissions of words – all those things which, if justified by the necessity, make the translation adequate to the target language doing no harm to the grounds of the translated materials which is SENSE. The translator in his/her turn (and this is what future translators are taught at Universities) considers that quality translated materials are the materials which bear no sense lapses and are ADEQUATE to the norms and rules of the target language. The translated material should sound nice rather than clumsy and weird. What is the target audience of the translated material? Who will read the translated stuff? Most evidently, native speakers of the language towards which the translation has been done. Will a native speaker want to read clumsy sentences and word phrases which sound more than strange for his/her native speaker’s ear? At this, the translator should not beautify the stuff he or she translates. If this or that structure is quite applicable in the target language though not very nice from the point of view of style and it could have been said better, the translator should use the same structure as the creator of the text (ONLY if it is possible from the point of view of the norms and rules of the target language).

Now, how can we prove to the customer that the stuff we translated is quality – even though we used some transformations and implemented necessary changes to make the translation copy conform to the norms of the target language? First of all, if the customer sees that the quantity of words in the original copy does not coincide with the quantity of words in the translated copy – this can bring doubts into their minds. It is true that languages have fewer set-phrases which could replace a descriptive notion than other languages. As a consequence, texts translated on some languages have more words than the original. For example, English and Russian: original English texts are always shorter than their translated equivalents.