When Duplicating Content Is Appropriate – And How To Do It In Your WordPress Posts

A lot of people are afraid of the dreaded duplicate content penalty. Some should be, but there is definitely a time where duplicating content can be handy (and appropriate) and where you won’t risk penalty from the search engines.

Programmers or web developers often use what are called include files. If you are familiar with FrontPage, they were referred to as Shared Borders. In a nutshell, it is the ability to make changes to 1 file and have that change implemented on any page of your web site automatically where the file has been included. For example, take the footer of this blog. The footer is used on every single page. If I wanted to add/edit or remove something from the footer and I wasn’t using shared borders or include files then the change would have to be made manually to every single page of this site, instead of just the 1 file.

In the situation where you may like to use duplicate content in several posts, but not all of them, the WordPress plugin WPAds can make it really easy for you. WPAds was written with advertisements in mind but can be used in may other ways as I will attempt to explain.

Examples Of In-Post Duplicate Content

I currently have a Blog Series going where one post is a continuation of the previous. I want to make it really simple for people to navigate to each part of the series, plus see at a glance how many posts are in the series at any given time. I decided to include a list of all of the posts in the series at the bottom of each of the posts. I’d rather not update each and every post each time a new post is included in the series. What I can do is create the list in it’s own separate file and include that file at the bottom of each post. Now anytime I update the include file, the updates will be reflected under every post.

Here’s an example of using WPAds as it was intended…for advertising. Since it has the ability to rotate the data you include it can come in handy for advertisements. In the same Blog Series discussed above, I would like to provide a list of resources with accompanying images at the end of each post. I may build on the list as time goes on. Instead of taking up too much space I may just want to show one resource at a time but I don’t want to have to manually change it every time. This plugin will allow me to add multiple items that will rotate every time the post is shown.

It can also be used to rotate random bits of text, like famous quotes for example.

To recap…it’s a great tool to use if you would like to include the same information in more than one spot and there is a chance that the info will change and it is necessary that it is changed for every instance of it. You can include the files anywhere really, not just in posts. It could be used in the header, footer and sidebars as well. The small amount of duplication shouldn’t be of any concern as far as the duplicate content penalty goes. Being that the surrounding content is (should be) unique, the duplicated content only reflects a small percentage of the overall content. It’s really no different than having the same footer on every page of your site (or blog).

How To Use Rotating (Or Static) HTML (Or Text) In Multiple Posts

OK, now for the “how to” part. As mentioned, the plugin to use is called WPAds, and like I said it was written with ads in mind but it works wonders for countless other purposes.

• Download WPAds from Box.net.
• Unzip and upload the wpads folder to wp-content/plugins.
• Activate the plugin.
• Go to Options, WPAds.
• Add a new “banner”. A banner is simply the block of text or HTML that you want to display.
• Specify a “zone” for the banner. If you have an existing zone created that you would like the banner rotating in then enter the name of the zone. If there is no existing zone or if you would like to have only one banner in the zone, enter a name to create a new one.
• You will then be presented with the code to use for your new zone (or include file). There are 2 pieces of code. One is to be used in posts and a different one will be used within the theme code (footer, sidebars, etc.). Just copy the code that is relevant to where you want to include it and paste it in.

Any questions or comments you know what to do :)