DIY SEO Health Check-up
Continuing on our path of web empowerment we encounter a very popular and feared topic: Duplicate Content. Why pray tell is it so fearful you ask? Well, lend me your ears fellow readers. The reason for this great anxiety is the fact that Google has ‘penalized’ websites which had a certain amount of duplicate content. By ‘penalize’ we mean it moved the website from its previous ranking in the search results pages all the way to the very back (which could be scores of pages back).
With that said it is clear to see why some would be in a panic as it could result in a total drop in website traffic and subsequently income.
Two Kinds
There are two kinds of duplicate content and only one of which we are interested.
One: text which is original to your website but you have copied it repeatedly on different locations within your website.
This is not the form of duplicate content we are talking about. You will not be penalized for doing this. Your pages just get less ‘points’ as you’re using the same content over and over.
Two: text which is taken from another website and put onto yours.
This is what we are talking about. Now, we must remember that all things are relative. Surely you could have on your website some text from other sites (snippets and so forth), but there is a point where it becomes overdone and triggers a red flag.
What Can I do?
In order to be on the safe side your website should contain nearly zero duplicate content (snippets are fine). With that said you must look over your website and recall where you got the text from or if you wrote it yourself.
Obviously Google will never release an exact figure on how much duplicate content you can have on your website until it becomes flagged. But as a guide line you should certainly avoid copying entire pages or large blocks of text.
If your current websites contains pages of text which you copied from other sites (competitors, wikipedia, blogs) then you must delete that content and get some unique text written as soon as possible.
If you have no idea where your text came from then you can do a quick Google search to see if it appears on other websites. Take a sentence from your site and search it on Google with double quotes (you MUST use the double quotes). If the results come up with some pages, go and click on them and see if all of the text on their page is the same as yours, or if it was just that one sentence.
Now a warning, if other sites show up it either means that THEY copied you or YOU copied them. What is the solution to this? If you are completely confident that it is your text then you don’t need to do anything particularly. But if you are unsure then you should get your text re-written.
Unfortunately Google cannot recognize the TRUE original author so if you discovered your site’s content is on other websites and you really want to make sure you don’t get flagged for duplicate content (although it was someone else who copied you and now has the credit as the original author), you can take maters into your own hands and rewrite your content to make it unique again.
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