When it comes to marketing online and getting your website in the search engines, there are some key rules to live by. For starters, you must make sure that your website does not exceed 40% or more of duplicated content. The reason is that the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and more will punish your site and possibly remove it from their listings entirely if the content is too similar to other websites.

Google sends their web crawlers all over the internet and they are like the internet police when it comes to scrutinizing your website. If you use Google toolbar, Google is tracking every move you make. This means that if you type in a web URL that no one knows exists, Google will still find out about it and index it. That can take away your wealthy marketer dreams.

So, let's say that you have a website hosted with a specific domain, and you use a different domain to do work on the website. You then transfer the completed work to your intended website. If you accidentally leave the mockup site up on the other domain, and if you check it on your Google toolbar web browser…. Google will find it. They will also automatically punish you for duplicated content. So, even if you never advertise the other mock-up site, and even if no one else knows it exists, Google may find it and remove your other site from their listings.

This can be a nightmare. There have been many people who have inadvertently done this with their website, only to find that a few days later their indexed site disappears or falls back 20 or so pages on the search engine rankings. Fortunately, if this happens to you, you must find the other website and remove all of the duplicated content.

Eventually Google will come back to the mockup site and note that the content is no longer there. It is then possible to get your other website back in their listings. This typically takes two weeks or longer and can be very frustrating. You will also find that your page ranking has been reset to zero, and it could possibly take months to get back on the listings you once were.

There is a lot of good information out there on the internet that can be relevant to your website. If you want to be a wealthy marketer, you will find that good content and fully rewrite it. Once it is properly rewritten, the search engines will not look at it like duplicated content and your site can be eligible for good listings if you do all of the other necessary optimization.

There are websites out there that will check your specific webpage against billions of indexed web pages. They will even tell you what percentage of similarity your site has with others. This is a great tool. As a rule of thumb you want to be below 40% for any website. Believe it or not, you could take just one sentence from two hundred websites and merge them into a web page. Then when you check the page against other websites, your similarity will probably be less than 10%. Of course you would want to reword these sentences to avoid any one from possibly accusing you of plagiarism. Nonetheless, if you stick to writing your own content and you ensure that you don't have more than one website with that content, you should almost never have to worry about it. Keep things simple and straightforward, and you too could become a wealthy marketer online by avoiding these easy to make mistakes.