Duplicate Content And Why To Avoid It

Content is key to search engine optimisation. Duplicate content dents your chances of achieving good rankings at best or even penalises your website at worst.  All search engines test for the uniqueness of text copy as part of their algorithms. If your website’s content is similar to another, your site could be subject to duplicate content penalties. Find out the main reasons why your content could be considered duplicate and why you should avoid duplications at any time.

Search Engines don't like duplications

As a general rule, search engines do not like duplicate content and they try hard to eliminate repetition and replication from their index. The Google Panda update has been largely affecting websites with duplicate and poor content. This trend in search engine algorithm development will continue beyond Panda. Copying content from other website is very bad practice but has been common amongst many website owners. Unoriginal copy can be easily detected by search engines algorithms.  The original content publisher gets all the credit and duplicate pages get penalised.

Duplicate contentis often generated accidentally or even carelessly by website owners.  Duplications are often as a result of poor content management or lack of knowledge. A copy & past approach to copy does not make your content unique, even if you make small change in keyword focus. Any lack of attention when DNS- / domain mapping can also lead to duplications. Google for example, can detect exact duplicates and near duplicates all the way from the crawl, through the indexing, through the rank scoring algorithm.

Avoid publishing:

• Identical page by page published from other websites.  If the other site has published the content first and has a better PR, your site’s content will be almost certainly considered duplicate and may be removed from the index.
• Identical pages within your site with only minor changes such as keyword replacements for example.
• Poorly localised pages within your international sites - they could be considered identical and duplicate.
• Campaign landing pages with minor keyword changes to original pages.
• Press releases or other articles containing the same content syndicated across different sites.

Make each webpage unique:

Let search engines know that your content is unique. Make sure all copy and all the page mark-up factors are unique:

• Document / file name
• Page title
• Meta description
• Meta keywords
• Vary first paragraph copy
• Headings
• Alt text
• Vary link text to other pages
• Vary page copy (or at least change the sequence of paragraphs where possible)

Sometimes you won’t be able to avoid duplicate content, especially when publishing product information on ecommerce sites. To be save, you can exclude duplicate pages in your robot.txt file. If unsure about the uniqueness of your content check your content regularly with copyscape (www.copyscape.com). Copyscape will identify any duplicate content on your website and show you other sites with identical copy. Copywriting is important for SEO. Unique, relevant content will make all the difference.

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