I've read some concerns that people have with identical content on their websites.

I guess the most basic way to check this is to do a search with copied text. I was wondering how others here check for that, and how often they do?

Hi Taggart,

Welcome to the Forum. Thanks for joining our community.

There are various tools that help you to identify duplicated content on your site:

www.virante.com/seo-tools/duplicate-content.php

This tool will look at:

* www and non-www header response;
* Google cache check;
* Similarity check;
* Default page check;
* 404 header response;
* PageRank dispersion check (i.e. if www and non-www versions have different PR).

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ will help you identify duplicated titles and metadescriptions.

However, you don't have to worry about duplicated content on your site. Matt Cutts, Google's 'anti-spam Czar' lays fears about this to rest here: www.mattcutts.com/blog/duplicate-content-question/

Cutts says:



He does warn about duplicated content that occurs offsite. This can be created via syndication:


Of course, another thing to worry about is that people would be stealing your content. A service like:

www.copyscape.com/

can help you find duplicated content. Usually writing a legal letter to the website owner gets the content removed.

Hi Lorenz. Thanks for the information and the welcome.

I'm at an early stage of applying what I'm learning here, but you did clarify a point for me. At first I thought that the concern was for duplicate content within one site.

Then I thought there may have been concerns regarding plagiarism, resulting in a lower page rank.

I'll keep the info above in mind.

One caveat: sites that steal content from other sites or post duplicated content open themselves up to penalties from Google. So the most important thing you can do for your site is to write the content yourself. If the content then is duplicated on your site, that's no problem (otherwise every blog would be penalized).

And when concerns exist that others might be stealing your content, this can be easily checked with sites like CopyScape.

Sometimes I think what happens is that one site pays for content and either owns multiple sites and uses it, or it gets stolen. I know though that I've done a lot of double takes when searching for something and then finding the exact some blog post on five different sites.

If you are using a template is there a way to prevent copyscape from identifying it with others using that template even if you content it totally different?