Duplicate Content… An SEO No No

Duplicate content is when any two web pages have the same content, no matter if they are on the same website or not. Duplicate content is a very sensitive subject and if you’re not careful it can absolutely ruin all chances of your site ranking well in Google. I’ve seen it many times, clients find information on another site that they like and they want to have that content on their site as well.

Duplicate content is something that many companies have to deal with when managing a website and should not be taken lightly. If Google finds that your site and somebody else’s website has the exact same content then one of you is going to be put into the supplemental results which is usually the newer of the two web pages. More information about supplemental results in a post to follow.

How to protect yourself from having duplicate content on your website.

* Don’t copy more than a few sentences of the other website’s content, if the content is that valuable then put a short paragraph and then link to the website that you are getting the content from.
* If you have content that you want to use as a page on your website then take bits and pieces of it and write your own content for that page using the other page as a reference for how to organize the content.
* Copy a section of your content and paste it into Google, see if any other sites are found using this content as the search criteria. If so, then you should probably change some of it.
* Use original content for links, instead of saying “Home” say “Mind’s Eye Home”.