Duplicate Content … Your Thoughts?
I know a lot of folks are reading my articles are still wondering if duplicate content is really going to hurt their sites.
Let’s break this down.
Duplicate content IS going to have a negative effect on your sites if you want to rank high in the search engines. You may as well not have bothered to put the page on your site at all because it will likely be filtered out of the regular search results. If your page is filtered out of the regular search results, it’s not going to be seen by surfers and you won’t get free search engine traffic from it.
So while it’s not exactly a penalty or ‘hurting your sites’, duplicate content does have a negative effect on your search engine rankings.
Here’s something to think about if you’re still not sure what to believe:
If you think about duplicate content in the most basic terms, would it benefit Google (or any other search engine) to show the exact same article 50 times slapped on 50 different sites on their search results page?
If you’re surfing the web for ‘dog potty training tips’, would you rather click through the top 10 results displayed and see the exact same article returned for each, or 10 different articles?
Users would rather see a variety of content when they search.
You know you’d be annoyed with the same content within the same search results!
And so is everyone else.
Tags: duplicate content, google, search, Search Engine Optimization, seo
I was helping out a friend’s site and noticed 2 paragraphs duplicated on 2 pages. The duplication parsed at 77% for the shorter page. Do you think only that one page could be downgraded, both pages, or the whole site? If the duplication is removed will the page rank again or is it a lost cause?
Thanks.
P.S. Glad to have found your blog from your LBB acquisition.
Old Florida Mikes last blog post..Surfing Hurricane Gustav At Holmes Beach
I notice that a lot of my pages with duplicate meta descriptions are not indexed. The meta descriptions are the same as the product is the same other than perhaps a different capacity to the first.
What should Ido about this?
Mike … thanks!
To solve the problem, I just would re-write the duplicate paragraphs. You’re not going to see much problem from just a couple of paragraphs, especially if the content is unique to the site. My main reason for making this post is to educate people who mostly use PLR/scraped content on their sites. Unique content is best if you want high search engine rankings.
JBO … it sounds like you are talking about an ecommerce site. You will want to make sure your product descriptions are different from other sites selling similar products. Try to write as much about the product as possible … as an estimate I suggest 250 words or more. If you want to write unique meta descriptions you can, but I don’t think this is causing your problem.
Your pages may not be indexed due to poor linking structure, no backlinks, too little content or a variety of other reasons, but probably not the meta description tags. It’s a good idea to change them out, but would be lower on my list of priorities.
Hi and thanks for the reponse.
Yes I am talking about ecommerce – I guess the content is a hard one s with 8,000 odd products that come and go it owuld be tough! But I guess I have got to do it!
Perhaps it the products that appear on page 2 or page 3 or page 4 etc of given categories that are not indexed well enough. How to make a better linking structure here I am not sure.
I will take your advice on board though – it is apprecaited.
JBO … an easy way to improve your linking structure is by adding a sitemap. There are sitemap generators that will automate this for you. Search in google
Like most things, this is not a simple black-and-white issue. In theory, the search engines will filter out duplicate content, although that also depends on how specific the query is. Longer tail search phrases will often turn up duplicate content. Big ticket searches are much less likely to show duplicate content. It is important to note that the search engines do not filter out all instances of an article -0 just the duplicates. Therefore, the article on your site should still show up.
But what if it doesn’t? What if it is filtered out and the article at EzineArticles.com shows up in the rankings instead? From a traffic perspective, that is almost as good, since the link in the resource box points back to your site.
There is another benefit to be considered from your article showing up all over the Web. Even if it never ranks for anything in the search engines, on your website or elsewhere, the links it brings in are still pretty powerful.
I really do not see how creating content and then allowing it to be duplicated can hurt a website’s rankings.
David Leonhardts last blog post..BrowseRank Strategies – Quality Content
David … thanks for your comments. I appreciate your opinion although I disagree with most of what you have written.
Having your article show up first in the search rankings on Ezinearticles vs. on your site are too very different things. It’s not ‘almost just as good’ unless you think giving away 90% of your traffic to Ezinearticles is a good strategy. In fact, you’re lucky if you can get 1 out of 10 readers of your articles to click through your resource box.
I’m in the business of making MY company money and assets, not ezinearticles.com so I try to keep the content on my sites unique to my sites. While I do submit articles to the directories, it’s not my main strategy as I’d rather invest the time and money into my sites than someone else’s. There are many ways to get links for SEO that don’t involve diluting out your content on hundreds of sites other than yours.
There are lots of different ways to do things, but I’m betting if you stopped submiting the same articles on your site to article directories, you’d get higher rankings and more traffic to your pages.
I agree. If your goal is to get people to your website, it is definitely not just as good to have your articles posted on another website come up first. I have an article on Scribd, for example–Religious Vocation According to Thomas Aquinas–and maybe 1 in 20 readers come to my website from it. I’m not really in the business of making money, and if people read the articles, it doesn’t matter much to me if they don’t come to my site.
At present more visitors come to off-site articles than on-site, because of having higher Pagerank. But if I was seeking to maximize visitors, it wouldn’t be the best approach to post articles this way.
Its all about common sense. Your example about searching for ‘dog potty training tips’ and getting a page back with the same article 10 times is a great example. Nobody wants that, its doesn’t make sense… I am guilty of submitting some duplicate articles to some of the well-know article sites and they do rank well and are duplicated on the first page, but they also take away the unique content from my own site. Its much better having an article on your own website and ranking on the first page than is is on 3 different websites.
Justin – Big Click Studios