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| Photo by Margan Zajdowicz |
Google May Penalize Your Website Search Rankings if You Use Duplicate Content
I have several new clients and I’ve talked with other potential clients who have duplicate content issues with their websites. That means that they own several websites with pretty much the same text on each website. These issues affect small businesses too — these are local companies and businesses from Houston, Sugar Land, and surrounding areas that are looking for search engine optimization help. Google’s recent “Panda” Update has probably demoted these websites in search engine rankings and the clients are looking for ways to move up in search results. It’s not easy!
The duplicate content issues arise in different ways. One potential client provides just about the same web services for two different customer groups, so he uses the same content to describe those same services. Another potential client is an automobile dealer who uses the product descriptions provided by the factories, which are the product descriptions used by every other dealer website. A different client hired a marketing agency that studied his business and then came up with some expensive advice to create a new domain name with different keywords. The client wanted to copy his current site to a new website with the new domain name. Still another client purchased his website from a company that creates affiliate sites all over the World for people in the same business sector, and 90% of the content on all of those websites is the same.
So what’s the answer to all of this duplicate content? It’s writing new, fresh content for these websites! The automobile dealer will have to develop new, original product descriptions. The client with the affiliate website will be paying me to create new content to replace the old stuff. The client with the ad agency domain name has created new content for his website that’s substantially different from the old site.
The Panda Update has reaffirmed Google’s commitment to searching for original content that’s relevant to search terms. If you do the work to create original content that’s relevant to what your customers are searching for on Google, then Panda will help your site rank higher. If you try to avoid the work or if your web developer avoids the work and expense by creating “cookie cutter” websites, you will suffer the consequences. IX SEO Services can help you develop creative ways to generate original text content for your website.
If you have questions, please call IX Brand SEO Services Company at 281-343-3284.
Related articles
- The importance of being original when it comes to website content (marketing.yell.com)
- Google’s “Over-Optimization” Update And Your Website (digitalsherpa.com)
- Beating Google’s Panda Update – 5 Deadly Content Sins (seomoz.org)
- Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World (seomoz.org)
