SEO competition is one of the most challenging missions in online marketing but there are few marketers realize that duplicate content on their sites is oftentimes the primary culprit for not ranking well.

The preferred victim for duplicate content are those right-from-the-box affiliate sites delivered upon subscription as an affiliate. Also there were reported problems with ecommerce sites and even marketing blogs.

How do you know if your site has dupe content?

Begin by inspecting the overall configuration of your website with it's footer, header, navigations and so on.

These site components form what is called the website template, mainly due to the fact that they remain the same as a visitor or search robot goes through individual webpages.

Here is a tricky part. Even though we generally overlook this immutable site parts, Google's spiders record everything they encounter. This is true regardless whether of not they are all content, pictures or mixes between the two.

Ecommerce websites.

Duplicate content is a big issue with ecommerce sites largely because they are made up of tens of webpages that contain thin paragraphs of text and an image for the product available.

This is where dupe content comes into being: the field designated to contain actual written content is thinner than the site's template itself.

When using images to design of fill in your page layout, consider the fact that the Google bot can't read pictures.

The problem can be easily fixed. Of course, with a decent amount of time invested.

Pinpoint the exact amount of text that builds the template versus the text contained in the editing area. Here's the know-how:

All you need to is copy and paste the entire web page into a word process eliminate all commercial related text so that you remain with only the template; count the number of words contained by your template. Hold on to it!

Your next move is to supplement the content already placed in the content container so that it outranks (numerically) the words placed within the template. If you take the time and do the work be sure to create some really unique content comparative with the rest of your product webpages; it's beneficial from search engine's perspective and also resolves the dupe content issue on your site, hopefully once and for all.

No other onpage factor is more predisposed to generating duplicate content as the title tag is.

Most certainly you're well aware not to write the same title for two separate web pages.

Important tip: When working to differentiate two or more title tags don't rely on stop words. Stop words are a distinct word category that Google overlooks when establishing keyword relevancy. It basically doesn't count them.

Duplicate content was pointed out as appearing on ecommerce sites also when the same product reviews appear on more then two websites.

The details are presented in the next section.

Affiliate websites.

Because of the immense number of affiliates, search engines are constantly refining their search results and exclude satellite sites from ever ranking for that group of key terms.

The thing with Google is that its aim is to render only one offer for a particular affiliate program and the one who gets the SERP position is usually the marketer with the most authoritative website, namely older domain and lots of backlinks.

For the rest of the crowd is an exhausting struggle to appear on the first page of organic listings. Not good enough because these domains contain identical content - referred to as offsite duplicate content.

Use these steps to place your affiliate site in the SERPs:

1. Create a new offer for your product or service and write unique pieces of content. This way you stand a good chance of being noticed by the search engines;

2. Build a unique marketing plan for your affiliate product with you in the spotlight. Please don't presume that this strategy is tailored for social media environment only. Once you find your unique selling point in the market references will start to sprinkle and with them come back links to your affiliate website;

3. Increase the content volume of your site by launching multiple new and unique webpages. Don't make your site all about sales pitches.

Blogs.

Without doubt the best CMS or content management system for young or tech-illiterate online marketers. But with all built-in automation, duplicate content can slip unnoticed among your content pages.

Three rapid tips to build and maintain a clean blogging platform, with no duplicate content:

1. Include each post in the category that best suits it's tone and theme. Never cross include the same article on separate categories;

2. How to use the "More" feature. First, Always use it. Second, use it precociously in the post;

3. Don't allow SE spiders to index user friendly sections such as archives, popular posts, latest posts, etc. To keep them out use the robots.txt file or insert the rel="nofollow" attribute.