You’ve probably heard of duplicate content. That is content which appears on more than one URL. This can be within your own site, or across several different websites. This can often be unintentional, such as having a printer-friendly version of your website or duplicate content in discussion forums. However, duplicate content is often malicious, with intentions to manipulate search engine results.
This creates several problems in regards to SEO:
One of the main aims of any website should be the user experience. Search engines are no exception to this. They want to create a good user experience, or else people simply won’t use them. Duplicate content helps to create a negative user experience. Users will be directed to the same content over and over again, rather than fresh, different content that matches their queries. This becomes frustrating for the user, and therefore creates the negative experience.
Because there is multiple content with the same keywords and phrases, search engines don’t know which version to excluding when indexing websites. You risk losing traffic to your website, as the other URL with duplicate content may rank higher.
It is a myth that duplicate content will hurt your rankings domain wide. However, your ranking may be affected depending on why you have duplicate content. In Google’s own words:
“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
So if you are intentionally trying to manipulate search engine results, and practicing black hat SEO strategies, you may find your website removed from Google’s index. However, this won’t happen with every case. If you have duplicate content, you can expect it not to rank as well as original content, but your whole domain ranking will not necessarily be affected.
The first thing to do is establish if there is duplicate content. Maybe your content has been taken and published elsewhere without your knowledge.
The first stage is to actually establish if any of your content has been duplicated. Fortunately, it’s very easy to find out. You can do this by:
If you've got duplicate content, whether on your own website or across different URLs, there are a few things you can do:
The best thing to do is ensure every page on your website is full of high quality, original content. This means it won’t appear that your website is intentionally trying to manipulate Google’s results page. However, if you have been stung by having duplicate content, it’s important to take the time to rectify the issue in order to improve both your SEO and ROI.
You’ve probably heard of duplicate content. That is content which appears on more than one URL. This can be within your own site, or across several different websites. This can often be unintentional, such as having a printer-friendly version of your website or duplicate content in discussion forums. However, duplicate content is often malicious, with intentions to manipulate search engine results.
This creates several problems in regards to SEO:
One of the main aims of any website should be the user experience. Search engines are no exception to this. They want to create a good user experience, or else people simply won’t use them. Duplicate content helps to create a negative user experience. Users will be directed to the same content over and over again, rather than fresh, different content that matches their queries. This becomes frustrating for the user, and therefore creates the negative experience.
Because there is multiple content with the same keywords and phrases, search engines don’t know which version to excluding when indexing websites. You risk losing traffic to your website, as the other URL with duplicate content may rank higher.
It is a myth that duplicate content will hurt your rankings domain wide. However, your ranking may be affected depending on why you have duplicate content. In Google’s own words:
“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”
So if you are intentionally trying to manipulate search engine results, and practicing black hat SEO strategies, you may find your website removed from Google’s index. However, this won’t happen with every case. If you have duplicate content, you can expect it not to rank as well as original content, but your whole domain ranking will not necessarily be affected.
The first thing to do is establish if there is duplicate content. Maybe your content has been taken and published elsewhere without your knowledge.
The first stage is to actually establish if any of your content has been duplicated. Fortunately, it’s very easy to find out. You can do this by:
If you've got duplicate content, whether on your own website or across different URLs, there are a few things you can do:
The best thing to do is ensure every page on your website is full of high quality, original content. This means it won’t appear that your website is intentionally trying to manipulate Google’s results page. However, if you have been stung by having duplicate content, it’s important to take the time to rectify the issue in order to improve both your SEO and ROI.
Some great insights here! Having content for conent's sake is an all too common mistake.
Thanks Ben. You nailed it. What a succinct post. You definitely covered most technical SEO related issues that small business owners find it hard to resolve. Great!