Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalty

Duplicate content is one of the most discussed, blogged, and talked about SEO topics – well, after link building, of course. Based on Google’s webmaster guidelines, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional, or at least not malicious in origin.” What exactly do “substantive” and “appreciably similar” mean? In my view, two pages can be termed “duplicate” if 30 percent or more of the page elements – title, URL, content – are similar to each other. For example, in the news/blog world, articles are often syndicated across numerous websites. Two types of duplicate content exist: within a domain and cross-domain. Read the complete article at-