Why search engine bots or spiders do not index webpages in their search engines which have copied content?

One of the Holy Grails for anyone with a website is to get high search engine rankings. It doesn't matter if you're an individual or a large multi-national corporation - high ranking with the likes of Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines is usually high on the list of your priorities. Of course, it's probably more important for businesses as opposed to individuals, but at the end of the day it's still one of the key targets of website owners today.

However, despite what many search engine optimization (SEO) specialists tell you, attaining a high search engine ranking isn't something that will happen overnight. In fact, you can pretty much guarantee that any SEO company that tells you that is probably not worth dealing with, as they're more than likely using what's known as blackhat SEO, or underhand tactics. This includes false links back to your website as well as cloaked pages (false submissions to the search engines), which can actually lead to your website being penalized and banned from search engines. So, how do you get your website indexed and moving up the search engine rankings?

Unique Content over Duplicate Pages

One of the most useful methods of increasing your web visibility is by using unique and original content or articles on your website. Google especially loves unique content, whether it's a blog post, a sales letter, a user guide or pretty much anything else that's relevant to your website. And since Google is the de facto standard for search engines, it's wise to stay on the right side of them.

The reason for this is that Google, essentially, is run by humans for humans. No longer can you just stick a bunch of keywords (the terms people type into search engines to find what they're looking for) onto your website and hope for traffic - the real success story now is unique content that people actually want to read.

This is why so many websites that don't have unique content are losing rank on Google, especially if they're using what's known as copied content. There are many examples of copied content - since not everyone can be a writer, they often take content from free article submission sites to get content onto their own website to flesh it out. The problem here is that this same piece of content could be on display on a thousand other sites. This then dilutes the effectiveness of the content in the first place - after all, no-one wants to read the same book a thousand times, right?

Google (as well as the other search engines) also looks on copied content as a form of plagiarism, and this can obviously be illegal depending on the circumstances. There is a great deal of internet theft around, and keeping track of it can be difficult. Thankfully, search engines and tools like Copyscape can protect authors from plagiarism - yet they're not foolproof, and is just one more reason why Google doesn't like copied content.

At the end of the day, you can certainly use copied content from places like EzineArticles, as long as you leave the author bio box attached. This is seen less as copied content since it's actually the original author that gets the link bonus, and they've already agreed that their content can be used elsewhere as long as the bio box is left intact. However, if you really want to benefit from Google's ranking algorithms and spiders, unique custom content will always win the ranking battle.