It has been well known for a couple of years now that duplicate content on a website can be damaging to a website’s search engine rankings. By duplicate content I am not talking about content such as that in the footer which is repeated on every page of your website. I am talking about content that exists on both your own website and somebody else’s. In a recent video Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam busting team, answered the question “How does Google handle duplicate content?”
He started out by saying that some duplication is inevitable and cites the example of quoting somebody else within your own website. The quote can be a valuable source of information and may be integral to the point that you are trying to make. Not to include the quote may render your entire article nonsensical. So this type of duplication is acceptable, although I would add that if you are going to quote somebody else on the web it is always best to include a link back to the original article close to where you have used the quote.
Matt also said in the video that one of the ways that Google handles duplicate content is to only show one result. If two pages carry the same content then Google will only display one of them. I thought I would put this to the test and use a quote that many people will have heard, Winston Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” speech. There are a lot of websites that carry extracts of this speech but if you search on Google for “we shall fight on the beaches” you will find that there is only one result on the first page that is just a single quote and the other pages include some sort of commentary around the speech.
This links in to what Google often discuss in relation to “adding value” to an article. It is OK to take content from elsewhere if you are going to substantially add to it. I have seen examples in the past where blogs have been made up almost entirely of articles that had been taken from somewhere else and although credit was given to the original author were effectively passed off as being the copiers own material. Your content must consist of your material not somebody else’s.
This then brings me on to another point that Matt made about people trying to create automated blog posts by taking snippets of text from a variety of sites and then stitching them together to form a new post on a different site. Small amounts of duplicate content that is taken from a variety of sources is still counted as duplicate content unless there is a substantial amount of your own material mixed in with it.
Many ecommerce site owners may worry that they have to create original descriptions for all the products that they sell. Here’s the good news, you don’t. Search engines are aware that often product descriptions are taken from a manufacturers marketing materials and do not penalise sites that do this.
Search Engine Optimisation and running a website in general is like most things in life, the more you put into it the more you will get out of it and there are very few short cuts that you can take. Rather than trawling the web looking for content that you can “borrow” for your own site invest that same time in creating your own content instead. It will be far more satisfying for you and will probably help boost your own search engine optimisation efforts!