SEO For Idiots - Duplicate Content

Okay, the title of this post is a bit harsh but it got your attention didn’t it? This is the first in a series of posts answering some relatively basic SEO questions that people typically get confused by. The questions are actually not that stupid, they are common misconceptions about how search engines work.

Today’s question is: What’s worse…duplicate content from within your own site or duplicate content from other sites?

The person asking this question wants to know if having duplicate content on pages within your own site is better or worse than stealing content from other sites and putting it on your site. This is like asking, what’s worse, a broken radiator or a broken transmission? Obviously, both are equally as bad, in different ways.

Duplicate content within your own site:
If two pages within your own site have the same content or a very high ratio of duplicate content, search engines will typically pick one of the pages and devalue the rest that are duplicate. This type of duplicate internal content is very common.

Duplicate content from other sites:
If you use content from other sites, search engines will penalize your site by devaluing the page on your site that has the duplicate content. But what if I had the content on my site and somebody stole it from me you ask? Search engines will typically know who had the content first because they look at the cache dates of both pages. Whichever site was first to be cached will usually be awarded as the original content owner. There are some exceptions to this rule but this is how it is generally decided.

A question that I get asked a lot is, how do I know if my content is unique enough? Basically, it comes down to ratios and percentages. If a large percentage of your content is duplicate, search engines will either devalue the whole page or the whole site. This is not always noticeable. For example, your site might have 30% duplicate content that has been copied from other sites compared to 70% of high quality unique content. If this is the case, search engines don’t want to throw out the 70% of your Unique content that is valuable to their users. Therefore, the solution is to just devalue the pages that have the duplicate content so that they don’t necessarily rank as high for competitive searches but would still rank for longer tail searches. This might be happening right now to a lot of your pages and you don’t even know it. While its great to rank for long tail searches, you don’t want your pages devalued if you can avoid it, so let’s get working on that duplicate content people!