When you produce duplicate content or upload duplicate content to your website it confuses Google and other search engine robots. These robots crawl the pages of Google to look for new and fresh content. When the robot comes across pages that they are unable to differentiate, the web pages will be penalised.
What does duplicate content mean for your business?
If you have content that you have scraped, taken, stolen or copied from another website, your website, and theirs, will be penalised. By penalised, we mean your ranking on search engines will be severely affected in a bad way.
Duplicate content means penalties for your business. These penalties include having the ranking of your website affected. You could be dragged down the pages on search engines, for example. In some cases, you could have your website page removed from a search engine all together.
Recent research showed that 29% of active website pages online are duplicate content. This research did not sit well with search engines. It meant that they could be sending users to the wrong pages or websites that are not the original source of the content.
With this recent research in mind Google announced that they can and will be proactively recognising something that could be a duplicate. This can be done even before the robots crawl the website for duplicate content.
Here at Creative Content Company we work with lots of new businesses that were keen to get their new website published, online and active. However, in some cases this meant taking content from another company’s website and inserting their own name. This is classed as duplicate content and could get your website removed from search engines.
If you think you may have duplicate content on your website, we would recommend you get it changed now. If you’re not sure how to make it unique yourself give us a call. We can re-write the content for you, so it isn’t classed as duplicate content.
If you want to check if you have duplicate content on your website, copy and paste a paragraph of text and pop it in Google. If similar pages come up, it’s duplicate content. Do the same for each page on your website and change what you need to, to make it unique content.
So, what does duplicate content mean for your business – it‘s not good!
