When trying to get your website ranked for specific keywords, duplicate content can be a big hindrance in your efforts. The main reason for this is the fact that most of the major search engines main priority is to find new, fresh and unique content meaning duplicate content rather defies this fact. Did you never wonder why search engines don’t normally pay heed to something already crawled before? As well as this, an individual searcher would find no benefit in having lots of content the same displayed to him? The simple answer to that is none.

What ways can you find out if content is duplicated or not? After all, you want to stay onside with the major search engines and now that you know duplicate content issues are frowned upon you don’t really want to be caught out. Here are steps you can take to find out by using Google.

The first thing you should do is search for your site in Google using the URL. This will basically show you all the pages that have been indexed by Google thus far from your site. What you need to do next is click on every one of the links that show up on the search page. If this message appears: “to see the most relevant results we have omitted entries that are similar” it means there are pages that have been omitted because Google classes them as duplicates.

There is a link that will ask you if you would like to do another search but this time including the omitted pages, so click on this. You will then see these omitted pages and will be able to fix them in whatever way you see fit in order to rectify things.

Although it is extremely difficult to have a 100% duplicate free website, you can help yourself by avoiding publishing reprinted things like articles from directories.

For Great SEO and article marketing