Every website owner spends a lot of time preparing and writing their website content. In this article we will discuss some tips on how to protect it and how to keep it unique. Good content is the king in search engine terms and can help in growing and turning your visitors into potential customers. So let’s get started.

Do not steal content

One of the main things to remember when writing content for your website pages is do not steal it from other sites. Stolen content adds no value to your site and may harm your search engine rankings which can result in your website being banned for duplicate content.

No duplicate content

It may become a bad habit when you find yourself repeating things you’ve already said on other pages. This mainly happens when your site grows and you are adding new web pages. Rule of thumb is to always check your pages for duplicate content and if you find it make sure that you alter those pages and make them as unique as possible.

Protect your content

At times you may find yourself wanting to protect your original content that you had spent a lot of time writing. There are a number of free duplicate content checkers available online such as Copyscape tool. If you discover any thieves you may want to report them for abuse to search engines by visiting Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. From legal aspects you may also content owners of such websites in question and consult with your attorney for further action.

Articles and distribution

If you are writing articles on your website you can check if they are distributed over the internet and can use the duplicate content checker mentioned above to find if anyone has posted them. To avoid duplicate content issues you can make changes to each reposted article to make them unique. You can also ensure that your articles are relevant to your overall site theme. Large websites that aggregate a lot of content on the same topic may outrank your website in terms of keywords and key phrases.

Ensure proper credit

If you are a contributing author to blogs or other portals, make sure that they include a link back to your own site. This will help if your own site has already gained good link popularity and you run no risk of being outranked by other sites using your articles. If you feel that your own website is smaller or weaker in terms of search engine positioning it’s good to make your articles look different in two different locations by altering or rewriting the article.

Microsites with identical content

When you find yourself using the same identical content on multiple websites such as smaller microsites you may want to jump over to Google Webmaster Tools and include tell Google which domains you prefer to be indexed and include your preferred pages in the sitemap file.

Multiple URLs on the same domain

Remember to block duplicate content pages from indexing if you have multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. You may also consider using robots.txt file and disallow those unwanted directories and pages.

Affiliate websites

If you have affiliate or partnership program try to rewrite product descriptions for example instead of using the originals provided by vendors. Whenever possible, it is also good to create additional unique and relevant content to make your site more attractive to users and search engines.

Multiple countries

When you are targeting multiple world markets with different languages, it is good to run several domains for each site copy in which case search engines will consider these domains as sites with different content. Targeting markets such as US, Canada, and Great Britain, always do your best to alter content on each site to make these sites feature unique and different content from the main website.