Avoiding Duplicate Content is Key for SEO
In the world of SEO, “duplicate content” refers to content that is repeated on numerous pages of the same website word for word. It’s bad to have duplicate content on your site for two reasons. First, it provides a bad user experience. If a visitor is clicking through the pages of your site and realizes that they are all the same they will essentially be wasting their time and will become frustrated and leave the website. Second, the search engines frown upon it. They view duplicate content as a spammy way to manipulate the search engines and get your site to appear more than once in a search engine result, increasing the likelihood that a user will click over to your site. If a search engine catches you using this tactic they will likely penalize you for it.
It’s important to note that duplicating content isn’t always done maliciously. For example a web page, and the “printer friendly” version of that page are technically duplicate content but the search engines realize this and don’t penalize for it. In some cases people just don’t have the knowledge and don’t realize that they are creating duplicate content. Some web developers don’t build sites with SEO in mind and may create two homepages: the regular one and one that is listed as the “default” or “index”. While the content is the same, the pages are different and each have different inbound links. Splitting the link value like this is very bad. One of the key components of SEO is building quality, inbound links to your site which builds trust with the search engines. The more that you have, the better. If half of these links are going to the homepage and half are going to the “index” homepage neither one of them is reaping the full benefit of these links.
Therefore, it’s important to watch out for duplicate content on your web pages. The search engines like new, unique content on every page. It’s likely that the content on each may be similar since they are all a part of one website which is generally about one thing. However, if you notice that the content is too similar make some tweaks to it, or just put it all on one page. Your visitors and the search engines will appreciate it.
5 Responses to “Avoiding Duplicate Content is Key for SEO”
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Good point Nick. Other things to watch out for include:
- http://www.yoursite.com versus yoursite.com
- session ids being added to your basic URLs
- the same page having 2 or more URLs depending on the visitor’s navigation route
Google Webmasters Tools can be very helpful in spotting and dealing with some of this
Great advice, Nick. One other thought: If you find content that you feel your website visitors will enjoy, post a link to the content from your site instead of reposting the content. The writer of the content will appreciate the link and may in turn be willing to post links to the content on your site.
Thanks for this Nick. One dimension of duplicate content I have seen loads of, often conflicting, thoughts and advice on is content that is duplicated across various websites/blogs/etc.
For instance, a post may be on a blog, that duplicated either word-for-word or pretty close to it, on another blog, on a site like ezinearticles.com or on another website.
Apart from examples like a recent one where the Social Media Examiner guy placed one post across various well known blogs and the ethical and relationship management issues this raises, does Google penalise you for placing pretty much the same content on different online locations outside of your own blog/website?
Finding different things to write about on each page is a chore but when you finish you`ll have a more search engine friendly site and that in itself will increase your traffic and ranking.
I totally agree with you on this one Nick.
Thanks and keep up the good work.
Nice little article here. I am currently looking into one of my websites that show Duplicate content while my other ones dont!! I am a bit mystified as I have the same coding in my ht access files!