Duplicate content is one of the most common website-related issues, particularly when websites outsource content writing to companies that don’t have their best interests at heart. The popularity of duplicate content means plenty of myths about it floating around, and this article will help you sort facts from fiction. For example, do you think you could be penalized by Google for duplicate content? You might want to think again!
Duplicate content, also known as duplicate content spamming, refers to publishing a webpage with near-identical content on multiple sites. Sites can get penalized for duplicating content if it is found that they are doing so maliciously or deliberately. Even if the site is not doing this maliciously or deliberately but doesn’t know about it, there is still the risk of being penalized by Google and other search engines for this action. Many search engines will penalize websites that publish duplicate content, leading to lower rankings in their respective search engine results pages (SERPs).
Duplicate content will confuse readers or leave you open to penalties from Google. If someone has copied your work and is passing it off as their own, then not only are they taking credit for your ideas, but they are also putting your site in danger of being penalized for violating Google’s guidelines. To avoid problems with duplicate content, make sure that all of the copy on your website is unique. That includes blog posts, articles, text links and everything else on the page. If you need assistance with this process, please don’t hesitate to contact a Christchurch SEO expert.
Google likes to reward original content and penalize duplicates. Avoid penalties by coming up with new ideas and ways to keep readers engaged. If you need more than a paragraph, try including a link to your full post on the subject so that it’s not as hard for your reader to find the whole story. For blogs that rely heavily on guest writers, you can use tools like Copyscape or Plagiarism Checker to ensure that all posts are unique. SEO agency Tauranga will help protect your blog from plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other risks of violating Google’s quality guidelines.
Google is not as up-to-date as you might think. It will often catch something a human would never know would be an issue. The content index is updated hourly and has large gaps between when the content was indexed or re-indexed. So while constantly publishing new content, Google may not notice or edit the page for a while. One example is if you have ever published a new blog post on your site but then made changes to your site so that the latest blog post shows up at the top instead. Even though you have published a new blog post, Google won’t know until they crawl it again and find out what’s changed.
Main photo: Felix Braas/unsplash.com
