Duplicate content is when you publish a web page that has the same content as another web page on the internet. That content can be on your own website or someone else’s website. Unfortunately, it is an easy-to-avoid mistake that many marketers still make.
Search engines look negatively at duplicate content because they don’t want web viewers to keep seeing the same content. Usually, only the first publisher of the content gets the listing while the rest are filtered out.
If you have duplicate content on your own website, search engines may view that as an attempt to spam the search engines and may downgrade your site. In general, having duplicate content of any sort is bad for your search engine rankings.
How can you avoid duplicate content?
Copyscape All Outsourced Content
Using Copyscape, search for a copy of any content that you have had outsourced. Copyscape will then search the web for any likely matches to your content and let you know if the content has been copied from another source. While it doesn’t happen often, occasionally outsourcees will take blocks of text from other websites and call it their own. If you put it up on your website, you risk getting penalized.
Minimize Duplicate Content Across Your Website
You are going to have some level of duplicate content on your website. For example, the navigation bar, the footer and the header are probably going to be the same across many of your pages. Some webmasters also have the same introduction, the same bio or the same call to action on all their pages. As you might expect, that is not good for search rankings. Aim to reduce duplicate content across your sites as much as possible.
If you are using a content management system such as WordPress, learn the ins and outs of how they organize content. For example, with WordPress, by default the categories section takes blocks of text from your main post and puts it in the categories section. In other words, it auto-generates duplicate content. This is a setting that can be turned off.
This is a pitfall with many systems that post “snippets” of text with a link to the full version. Google sees the same text twice, sometimes even multiple times throughout the site and may penalize you. Learn how your CMS organizes content and make sure your settings are optimized to reduce duplicate appearances of the same content.
Avoiding Duplicate Content
Once you get in the habit of searching Copyscape for duplicates and set up your website in such a way that reduces duplicate content, then duplicate content shouldn’t be an issue. A little bit of vigilance in making sure your content is original can go a long way towards protecting you from search engine penalties.
