Internet Marketing and SEO Tips

Duplicate Content Could Hurt You More Than Help

by Dave Maloney
The best and most tried and true way to get ranked high in the search engines is to create content - great unique content. Whether you're writing copy for your webpages or a blog post, if you duplicate content that's already indexed online you're not doing anything to help your rankings.

Whether it's a newsletter or press release, even a downloadable pdf file, if it's been crawled by search engines and you use it on your page, it will be considered duplicate content. You may think that just by changing a few words here and there, you may be covered, but not true. Aside from being against the law (it's called plagiarism, and you can be sued for it), Google and other search engines offer their own repercussions for duplicate content.

Google's robots can see the patterns of duplicate content and will attribute the content to the original author, awarding the original author with high rankings for those search terms. Your page with the duplicated content will be penalized you with a low ranking or no ranking at all. If you want to quote a passage from another article, make sure you give credit where it's due; you could even link to the original source. Now for your page to rank for the corresponding search terms, add a paragraph or two in your own words with your own take on the subject. Even if the original source was your own words to begin with, reusing already-online content won't impress search engines and won't help your rankings.

So write your own! Your teacher in grade school (a few years back) could tell without a computer when your history paper came right out of World Book Encyclopedia; now it may cost you a lot more than a note home to the parents!