Duplicate Content is when the same words are repeated on multiple pages or urls. The problem with Duplicate Content is that Google tries to eliminate these repeated pages so that users get a variety of results rather than a lot of repeats. On one hand that is good, but for people who need their content to be ranked highly it could be bad. When a page is considered by Google to be a duplicate, it does not display in the natural result. Instead, you must click a link to ‘view omitted results’.
I’ve linked to a video below with Greg Grothaus, an Engineer at Google Search Quality. Greg says Google does not ‘penalize’ websites for duplicate content, but not displaying is a form of penalty. Worse, he makes some vague statements about whether content that is a duplicate of another website is spam. He gives examples such as Wikipedia. I wonder how they know where the original content came from because a lot of people updating Wikipedia would just cut and paste snippets from other people’s websites.
Interestingly enough, we find many Motel Owners demand that we use duplicate content. Let me explain. Motels often have snippets of official descriptions that they want to use on every website. They think it keeps their message consistent – sort of like a branding statement. If you didn’t care about Search Engines that might be good logic.
Our goal as search optimizers is to display as many different web results as possible for each motel we service. So, if we add a listing to a regional website it is necessary to mix up the text so that it reads well and keywords are employed. We want search engines to display every instance of the motel’s web advertising as unique and relevant to users. Making something different for every website is tricky. How different is also a question that can be hard to determine. Certainly, if you are adding new listings, try to say something that is fresh.
Here is Greg Grothaus’ video on Duplicate Content. It’s a bit technical at times, but interesting.
