Hey guys! I hear there are some SEO “experts” who claim that posting duplicate content on your website is a “terrible” idea. Please don’t believe everything you hear. If you have someone who is an “expert” claiming duplicate content is terrible you may want to rethink your choice of SEO experts. I don’t expect you to believe me either, so I’ve found a video from the head of Google’s webspam team explaining why duplicate content is not a problem unless you’re using it maliciously to be spammy.
I’ve also set up a quick experiment you can do yourself to prove the point.
Try this. Copy/paste this sentence into your Google browser and do a web search. This is the first paragraph of a news article.
After more than 60 years spent sealed up in a library storage facility, about 1,000 letters written by poet T.S. Eliot to confidante Emily Hale will be unveiled this week, and scholars hope they will reveal the extent of a relationship that’s been speculated about for decades. Many consider Hale to not only be his close friend, but also his muse, and they hope their correspondence will offer insight into the more intimate details about Eliot’s life and work. Students, researchers and scholars can read the letters at Princeton University Library starting Thursday.
What do you see on your screen when you copy/paste the above paragraph into the Google search box? When I look at the results on my screen, the first thing that comes up is my LOCAL Fox News website. Because it’s geographically close to me Google is going to guess that it is the source that is most relevant to me. You can read the exact same article on 100s of sites. They’re not worried about duplicate content penalties. Google understands that they’re providing these stories not to manipulate their SEO but to provide information that’s relevant, entertaining, and useful to their clients.
When discussing duplicate content issues, Google is generally referring to the same information posted in multiple places on the same website. For instance, I see many SEOers put city links at the bottom of home pages then link each one to a page that has the exact same content as the other city links. This is what Google is referring to when it mentions duplicate content issues: the same content posted in multiple locations on the same website not to add value to the user experience but to manipulate search engine rankings. Google can perceive this as “spammy” and choose to lower that site’s rankings.
I don’t expect you to take my word for it. So here’s Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, explaining it:
And yes – that video might be a few years old, but you can visit Google’s own webmaster tools to see that they’re still saying the same thing today.
Providing relevant, engaging, fresh content to your users on a consistent basis will not hurt your SEO. In fact, it will help your SEO, because Google is all about the user experience, and if you provide great content consistently that drives traffic to your website this will help your SEO. And getting potential clients to your site by sharing links to this content on your social media platforms will also increase your business’s exposure.
So please don’t believe everything you hear. If I did SEO for people, I certainly would not want them to learn to do it themselves. I’d be out of a job. That’s not what I do. I teach others to do their own SEO so they don’t have to pay someone else to do it for them.
And if you’re shopping around for other businesses like Copy | Paste | Post | Done that sell licensed content, here’s a list of other places to check out: