Duplicate Content and SEO

As more businesses start to bring their products and services online, there is a growing issue with duplicate content. Search engines do not like duplicate content, and will filter out all but one of the pages that have the duplicate content, usually just showing the first site to have the content in the SERPs.

When search engines are looking for duplicate content, they are looking for substantive blocks of text, within a website or across several sites, that either completely match or are very similar.

One of the many ways in which duplicate content can occur is when people copy your content for their own site, whether this is done maliciously or naively, the result is the same, your site may be penalised. The best way to deal with this is to get in contact with the owner of the website and ask them to either remove your content or change it to something that isn’t taken from your site.

Another good example of duplicate content is one that may be affecting you if you run an e-commerce website. When you add products to your site, do you use the product descriptions that the manufacturer has written originally for your e-commerce site? Most other websites that are selling the product will also be doing this. When you are adding products, you need to make sure that all product descriptions are rewritten so as to be unique.

The best way to check to see if any content you have is duplicate is to search in Google for a sentence or two of the content. The results will show you any websites which are using text that is much the same if not an exact copy of your content.

Another option to check for duplicate content is a website called CopyScape (www.copyscape.com). It is designed to help web site owners fight plagiarism by helping to show all sites that are using the same text as your site.

Remember, using content copied from other sites on the web will not help your site in the search engine results. It is much better to spend a few minutes now writing original content than have pages from your site filtered by Google.

Nadeem
SEO Programmer