Duplicate Content Can Be Worse Than No Content

Search engines – Google, Yahoo, and MSN – love original content.

The cornerstone of their success lies in their ability to provide relevant, unique results for searchers. If search engines were unable to distinguish and eliminate duplicate content, every time a user typed in keywords, hundreds or thousands of identical results could show up, essentially clogging up the search engines and rendering them useless.

As a result, for some time, search engines have been adept at ferreting out and eliminating duplicate content. They’ll credit the first couple of webpages with unique content, and everything that follows will be dumped, meaning that if your website is full of content that’s spread across the web, you’ll have difficulty getting referrals from search engines.

Who typically uses duplicate content
The most common users of duplicate content are: franchise owners, affiliates, branch offices, e-commerce stores, and small businesses that have purchased ready-made websites from a company within their industry.

If you have a site like this, undoubtedly, you launched it with the best of intentions, but search engines view the practice as a shortcut and despise it. To please search engines, your site has to contain original, unique content, not pre-built, recycled matter.

What qualifies as duplicate content
Search engines are very particular when it comes to duplicate content.

They can detect not only identical structures (the look and feel of a site), but also partially-copied structures. In addition, they can sniff out identical content, as well as similar, reminiscent, and paraphrased content.

When this happens, they’ll recognize the first handful of sites with duplicate content, then ignore all the rest, omitting them entirely from search engine results.

How duplicate content affects page ranks
Google, the #1 search engine that directs 66% of all search traffic, ranks webpages on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest. The higher your page rank, the better your chances for appearing at the top of search engine results.

Websites with duplicate content typically have page ranks of 0, making it impossible for them to receive free search engine referrals.

The only option for duplicate-content websites is to pay for clicks. And while pay-per-click campaigns can pay off (depending on your industry and the competition for the keywords you’ve chosen), their main drawback is that the moment you stop paying for clicks, the hits vanish.

What to do about duplicate content
If your site contains duplicate content, your options vary, depending on the extent of the duplication.

If you have a small amount of duplicate content that you’ve taken from other sites, such as a few pages, or a handful of product descriptions, rewrite the copy to make it completely original.

If you’ve allowed other websites to reprint copy from your site, stop the practice immediately and realize that the pages that were replicated might be tainted and may never fare well.

If the bulk of your site came from a website designer that provided you with stock material to choose from, consider starting from scratch. A five- or ten-page site full of unique material can be more appealing – to visitors and search engines – than a fifty- or hundred-page generic site.

What’s the point of your site
If your website contains duplicate content, the decision about what to do next essentially boils down to this: What do you want your website to accomplish?

Why did you pay for a website in the first place? What impression do you intend to convey to visitors? If you put up a site because you felt obligated to have an Internet presence, duplicate content might have satisfied that requirement. But if you want to tap into the full power of the web, which has become the modern-day Yellow Pages and word-of-mouth rolled into one, you’ll need to reevaluate your commitment to your site.

After all, while the rubber-stamp approach can lower the cost of a website, a site that no one can find becomes the most expensive site of all!

Copyright 2008, Jennifer Croft

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