On the whole, when we are talking about duplicate content, we mean large paragraphs that match exactly or are very similar to content in other Web sites or domains.
Why duplicate content is important to avoid?
In first place, avoiding duplicate content is important because Internet users typically want to find exclusive material when searching, and seeing the same thing over and over again when searching can be pretty annoying. By the way, Google is superior at detecting original content appropriately, which results in no negative effects for the Web site that originated that content.
The two most common stages for this type of issues are:
• Content duplicated in your own Web site, which means that you have the exact same content repeated more than once.
• Content duplicated in a completely different domain. For instance, if there is content exactly like yours appearing in other Web sites.
Although, in most of the cases this isn’t intentional, in some situations the content is duplicated in order to handle search engine rankings or use queries to generate more traffic. In this kind of situation, where there are signs of malice, duplicate content could be viewed as a violation to webmaster guidelines.
There are some interesting tips that Adam Lasnik from Google shared on his post on dealing with duplicate content. Here are some of them:
• Your internal links should always be consistent.
• Be careful when syndicating your content on other Web sites, be sure they include a link to the original article, on every article.
• Make brief summaries to present your articles and then link to the page with the full article.
• Don’t use placeholders because most users are annoyed by empty pages.
• Make sure you understand your content and the way it is displayed on your page, mostly when a blog, or forum is included, it can show the content in various different ways.
In summary, if you have duplicated content, it won’t affect you negatively when it comes to your presence in Google’s index, but it will be filtered out.
Our Los Angeles Web Design team can help you to provide users with unique and relevant content and have more control on what exactly Google is crawling and indexing and which versions are more likely to appear in the index. If you need any help, just call us today at 1-800-932-2580.
