Does Duplicate Content Impact Your Rankings?
Myths and facts about how duplicate content impacts your Search Engine Optimization
If you own a business and do digital marketing, chances are, you’ve probably heard of duplicated content. Many people believe that duplicate content is one of the worse SEO mistakes you can possibly make. Do not worry, it really isn’t.
Many people do not even know what duplicate content means and really how it impacts your SEO campaign.
To get started, let’s understand exactly what duplicate content is.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content just means that your content appears at more than one location or URL online. Basically, meaning that the same content is available on different URLs. This is considered duplicated content.
What actually counts as duplicate content?
Click here to learn what Google defines duplicate content as.
Duplicated content could include anything from a product description to an entire page if it appears multiple times on your website.
Why You Should Avoid Duplicated Content
Well, search engines like Google don’t know which URL to show first in the search results. They’ll try to determine which result is most relevant to the particular search query, but there’s a chance they’ll get it wrong.
According to Google “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search results.”
If Google gets it wrong, your target audience may not see your content. Or, they won’t engage with it.
Just because you should limit duplicate content doesn’t mean it’s all bad. To help you better understand how this type of content really impacts SEO, let me bust the myths.
Having Duplicated Content Hurts Your Search Ranking
Duplicate content may, in some cases, affect your search rankings, this type of content has far less impact on your search rankings than you might think.
Google considers a whole host of factors when crawling, indexing, and ranking pages. Make sure you’re building a reputation for creating unique and valuable content so Google is more likely to crawl your page and rank it higher than the duplicated content pages.
Google Penalizes You On All Your Duplicated Content:
Google isn’t out crawling websites looking to penalize them for duplicate content. The only way this will happen is your site shows deceptive behavior. According to Google’s guidelines, if you’re duplicating content just to manipulate search engines, you’ll remove the offending pages or lower your entire search ranking.
Reposting Your Guests Post on Your Own Site Doesn’t Help
Guest posts are a great way to get more traffic and boost your authority as an industry leader. Just be careful to not link too much from your guest posts. Guest posts usually have more outbound links than inbound. That said, if you decide to guest post, there’s a chance your usual audience won’t see your guest posts, so you might want to republish this content on your own blog.
BUT wait, won’t republish the guest post hurt the rankings?
No, not really.
How you do this is by adding a little HTML tag to the post to distinguish an original version of an article from republishing ones.
Google Can Tell the Original Content Creator
Search engines cannot identify the original content creator or URL. This is one of the main problems with duplicate content. There’s a chance someone online could steal your content, publish it on their own blog, and call themselves the original creator.
This is called plagiarism. Google takes plagiarism seriously if they can find it out.
Hopefully, this adds some knowledge for you about duplicate content
Despite what many marketers believe, duplicate content isn’t that big of an issue. Unless of course, you’re doing it on purpose. Google will not punish you with a low search ranking just because it runs across duplicate content here and there. But it would be a great idea to audit your website and content and remove any duplicate content when found.
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