How to Kill Your Website With Duplicate Content

It happened again this week. A potential client came to us to find out why their website wasn't drawing traffic. When we ran his site though our software and manual research we discovered his site was over 60% duplicate content. The sites that carried the same content had additional unique and fresh content, plus other SEO activities, making them more desirable to search engines. To change the results he was getting would require a rewrite of the majority of his website. To change the results, you have to change what you are currently doing. Something he is still pondering.

 How many times have you visited a website and thought "Have I been here before?" That feeling of Déjà vu may just be that you are reading content that someone copied from someone else, who copied it from someone else and so on......

 This happens for one of a few reasons:
1.) Lazy webmasters who do a web search for content and simply copy and paste.
 2.) Content is deliberately duplicated in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.
3.) Site owners are carrying popular products and have difficulty creating unique content.
 4.) Site owners are publishing articles on their site an then copying the same articles onto blogs and several article sites.

Duplicate content can hurt your website. It will hurt your ranking, and couple potentially cause negative user experience. 

According to Google, somewhere between 25% to 30% of the content on the web is duplicative.

Search engines prefer to show one of those pages of content in their search results. Google, for example, takes all the duplicates and groups them into a cluster. They will then show the best of the results in that cluster. Which may or may not be your website. If you search for the content on your site, and your website isn't the one that appears, you may be included in the cluster and without other unique content and SEO, your site may not rank high enough to be seen.

 The solution is to
1.) Consider what results you want to receive when doing a search for something.
2.) Create unique, useful and quality content.
3.) Add testimonials to add unique content.
4.) If you are writing articles limit the exposure of the full article to your website and/or blog. Post excerpts or comments on other genuinely authoritative sites with links back to your website.

With the new updates in search algorithms, it has become even more important to take the time to make your website uniquely yours.

Content should be UNIQUE, CLEAR, CURRENT, EDUCATIONAL, CONCISE,  RELEVANT, ENGAGING and CONSISTENT.


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Keeping the content on your website current and updated regularly with helpful and relevant information is very important. So if your website hasn't been updated in a while, regardless of how attractive it might be or how important you think that information is, it may be time to tweak, add to, change or restructure your website for better results.

If you think your website needs an overhaul, let's talk. Click to email us. We'll listen first, look at your online presence and then offer our recommendations. One size does not fit all.The solution for you should be unique to your business and goals.