Duplicate Content

SEO Black Hat Techniques: What NOT to do

As well as being a source of varied and diverse information, the internet also contains much duplicate, or near duplicate, content.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content is substantial blocks of copy, within one or more domains, that either completely matches, or is extremely similar to, other content. Although it is usually not intentionally deceptive, it will have a negative impact on ranking.

Copying text from public domain sites such as Wikipedia and other company or personal websites is often done in an attempt to quickly develop site content in the mistaken belief that any content is better than none. In fact, duplicate content is worse than no content, as both websites will find their ranking in the search engines decrease and, as a consequence, will receive less traffic.

There is no creativity in duplicate content, and it’s not helpful for users to find several websites saying exactly the same thing.

What about IP theft?

Many search engines classify duplication as trickery – webmasters trying to get quick, free content for their own websites without having to pay a professional copywriter. But it actually extends beyond mere trickery as many website content owners would consider the act of copying their text as intellectual property theft.

What are mirror sites?

Some companies mistakenly duplicate an entire website on different domains such as .biz, .org, .net, .co.uk or .com in the hope of manipulating search engine rankings or winning more traffic. However, the search engines will not be fooled, and will only rank one of these mirror sites at a pretty low level; they don't want a lot of identical content in their results because it takes up storage space and is frustrating for readers.

In many instances, designers and web builders may not be able to help duplicating certain words or phrases. However, search engines are able to differentiate between sites with a few similar words or sentences, and the duplicated ones created by webmasters specifically for the purpose of increasing ranking.

What are content filters?

Most search engines now use a ‘content filter’ which enables them to weed out any websites duplicating content. This means they only show the user whichever site they decide is the most useful and informative. The danger with this is that if someone has ‘stolen’ your text, your website could be the one that the search engines decide to blacklist as there is no way of telling who originated the content first.

What are the risks?

Punishment for duplicate content often means your site is given a new, lower ranking in the search engine results pages. Search engines will not usually ban your site completely unless it’s felt that you’re attempting to deceive users and manipulate results. However, the owners of the website you’ve stolen your text from may report you, which could lead to a ban. Google does not approve of duplicate content and has an article dedicated to explaining why.

“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we will also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

Rather than risk being dropped by the search engines entirely, webmasters should be careful not to reproduce text from another source and website owners should keep a careful eye on their own content to prevent intellectual property theft.