Duplicate site content is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when once a page of content has literally been copy-pasted to another page of the site; same content, different URL. This is a surprisingly common mistake on many websites and it can be extremely detrimental to your site’s trust factor and overall user-experience. Both of these factors have a strong affect on your site’s rank within the search engines, so duplicate pages can negatively affect your SEO as well.
“Default” or “Index” Pages
These duplicate pages are by far the most common examples of duplicated content. Most web developers don’t also have a strong background in SEO, so they create two homepages: the regular one and one that is listed as the “default” or “index.” The “default” page is often the one that any “HOME” links or the company logo link back too.
Why are “default” pages bad?
Aside from being duplicate pages, default pages can split the link credit that is being passed from outside sites to your own. One of the key components of SEO is link building, which about developing quality, one-way links that point to your site. This helps establish a trust factor with the search engines, as that external site passes some if its own trust factor along to the sites it links to. The more links a page has pointing towards it, the better. Duplicate pages are going to steal some of that link juice away from the real page, devaluing its worth.
Intentionally Duplicated Content
Some low quality sites and spam blogs will steal content from another site and post it as their own, pasting the page content word for word. These sites exist solely to host dozens of AdSense ads or provide hundreds of low-quality links to other sites. However, sites like this are severely frowned upon by the search engines. They are viewed as an attempt to influence the search engines SERP, which is not something Google and Bing take kindly too. The recent Google algorithm update (Panda) was designed to indentify and penalize sites that did this.
Why is “borrowing” content bad?
You don’t want your site to get labeled as a spam site, which could result in severe penalties from the search engines, including your site being removed entirely from the results! You shouldn’t be copying content in the first place (it’s plagiarism), but if you want to quote another site, be sure to give credit and link back to the original post.
Duplicate Content and the User Experience
Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor to your site. As they are navigating through your site they are getting the strangest sensation of déjà vu. It feels like they just read this paragraph on the previous page! That’s because you just carried the content from one page to another. How long do you think someone is willing to sit there and read the same information again and again? Duplicating content on various pages of your website wastes the time of your visitor. If you don’t have anything new to say, why create a new page with the same information? A smaller, well-written site provides a lot more value than a site with 300 pages that all say the same thing.
Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO services agency located in Boston, MA. With over 12 years of Internet marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal (or SEO Journal).
Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com
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