What Does Google Say About Content Duplication, Copyright and Authorship
Content is king that enables a website to provide information to visitors that they are looking for. Web content may include text, images or documents that also improve ranking of that website to get crawled by search engines like google.
Content is written in an effective manner to not only feast information to a visitor but to also present it in an eye catching way that he quickly scans it to save his time and get maximum knowledge out of it. These include usability factors of a website that help to develop better content strategy.
Content writing today has become a big game to achieve top page ranking, to draw more traffic and to increase visibility of a website. However, there exist major concern to acknowledge whether the content is fresh, duplicate or rephrased.
What is Fresh Content?
Fresh content is the terminology used in SEO (search engine optimization) for the content that is new in nature, and is freshly produced. It enables a website to get more visitors who are looking for fresh content. Such content also helps a website or web pages to get better placement on search engine result page because some pages get crawled as frequently their content is updated to the new one.
What is Duplicate Content?
The content that has been copied from some other webpage, reused, modified or changed to an extent, is considered as Duplicate Content in Search Engine Optimization. Duplicate content may result in penalizing a website and some search engines like Google are known to filter duplicate content that results in lower keyphrase position.There exist three kinds of duplicate content:
- True Duplicates: A true duplicate content or web page is 100% identical (in content) to another page and differs by the URL only
- Near Duplicates: A near duplicate is slightly different from another web page or content that may include variation of text, image, or the order of content.
- Cross-domain Duplicates: A cross-domain duplicate content occurs when two websites share the same content, that can be “true” or “near” content. This type of content has copyright or legitimate issue.
What is meant by word “Copy”?
Word “copy” is often confused in search engine optimization. It has different meanings in terms of its use and the medium.
- In advertising, web or content marketing, and communication, copy refers to a written material, content or text of books, magazines or websites. It has different forms like photocopy, hard copy, e-copy etc.
- As an action, word copy stands for duplication of a text or an artifact from one webpage to the other.
- As a command, word copy is used to copy computer files from one directory to another one.
How Google is going to examine if an uploaded content is fresh/unique?
Content freshness is very important for google that helps search pages to be “fresher” by using fresh content. It is not that new concept for google to boost a fresh content, it dates back to 2007 with “Query Deserved Freshness” and then in 2009 as ““Caffeine Update”. Now, google has rolled out these freshness updates, and examines the content to be fresh, based on its inception date and time.Content Types: There are two types of content.
- Stale Content – It is the content that is not updated for a period of time
- Fresh Content – This content is frequently updated and modified.
- As it is crawled and indexed
- As it appears in search results
If a freshly produced content is uploaded on a web page, and is crawled and indexed into Google Index and later, the same content is duplicated and placed elsewhere on internet, google is going to examine the true source of the content, where it got crawled for the first time. The freshness of content is evaluated using the formula and detail given here.
Google Content Authorship Mechanism
Google Authorship was introduced to give credit to those individuals who did lot of content writing and contributed for influencing good ranking in SERPs. However, in 2014 Google announced to discontinue the authorship program.
The Authorship aimed to know the true creator, or author of a web content. Its objective was to identify the individual or true source who paved Google to score fresh content that also influences search rankings of a web page.
There are many individuals who are indulged in content plagiarism or duplication such as totally or partially duplicating a web page content, re-phrasing or using citation and references merging them in own ideas. In this way, the content of a web page written by Author A becomes the asset of Author B.
Copyright & Content Duplication Removal Techniques
The mystery still lies in knowing the author of content. What technique he can use while writing or producing a fresh content to his credit?
An author can use copyright or can generate legal removal of copyright content that is his property. There are generated millions of requests from copyright owners to remove such content that infringes their copyrights.
The other way to deal with it is to go for SEO practices for removing that duplicate content by following many practices elaborated here. This will help an author to avoid his content getting duplicated by other individuals or sources.