SEO Blog

Whilst there’s nothing to suggest that you will receive any kind of major drop in rankings as a result of using duplicate content or code, you certainly shouldn’t expect too many favours either. For many, duplicating content that you’ve created for other pages of a site or seen elsewhere is the easy choice.

What could be easier? You’ve done the hard work, produced a good bit of Meta or a page of copy, replicate that elsewhere and you have to been on to a winner right? Well, wrong actually. Duplication should be a last resort. It is an option for those who have to fill a page but really don’t have the time or resources to do so from scratch.

You see, the moment you take content from elsewhere it immediately loses value. The search engine crawlers aren’t daft. They scan millions of pages every day and can easily spot content they’ve seen elsewhere. As I said at the beginning, these crawlers aren’t vengeful. You won’t suddenly plummet through the rankings, but you certainly won’t get any benefit.

One issue you will certainly have, particularly if you have written a very effective piece of copy and published it on your site or elsewhere, is that by duplicating it you will dilute its effectiveness. The more times content is reused, the more value that it loses. This does of course pose an issue in so far as it could affect your SEO efforts, particularly on those copied pages.

I know it has been written a million times before, but there really is no substitute for good quality, unique content. Your visitors will thank you for it and the search engines will certainly be more inclined to rank you a little higher in their pages.

But in the same regard, I also understand that not everybody has the resources to take time out to write this content themselves or hire a professional to do it for them. This of course raises the issue of which pages you need to focus on and which can be sidelined for now. This becomes truer with larger sites. If you have hundreds of products, sometimes writing an individual description for each isn’t possible. This is where the CTRL C + CTRL V and a little selective editing might come into practice.

As previously mentioned, this should be avoided where possible, but it is a viable option if you just can’t get the time yourself. It might limit where you can rank for certain terms for the pages in question, but something is better than nothing – if only from a visitor’s point of view. But if you can tweak the copy, replace a paragraph here, add a personal touch there, you are less likely to suffer a penalty. A nuisance maybe, but for the sake of your site’s SEO, it might well make all the difference.

So don’t make duplicated content your goal, but if absolutely necessary use it – albeit with a few tweaks. You will get so much benefit from original content and none at all from duplicate copy; but it isn’t just about search engines, it’s about visitors too. You should always try to write each page individually, but something is always better than nothing at all.