Here’s Guidance from Google on How Duplicate Website Content May Hurt Your SEO
From time to time, I get questions from clients about boosting search rankings and SEO by purchasing from content aggregators. For example, a medical client might be considering purchasing medical news from major newspapers and then posting that information to her website. It sounds like a great idea — all of this fresh, well-written medical content added to the client’s website! However, the content is fresh, but it’s not unique and unique, relevant, and fresh content in what Google is looking for, and it’s what Google rewards with high search results rankings. Because this content is not unique, it’s use on your website will very likely hurt your search engine results placement. Essentially, you’re spamming your own website! You’re hurting your own SEO effort!
A similar spamming situation involves affiliates. If you’re selling products or services as an affiliate of an organization and you use the organization’s content to create your website, you may create problems for yourself. Google and the other search engines will see substantially the same website content from all affiliates of your organization and you won’t do well in search results — again because your website content is not unique. This happens with car dealerships where the dealerships use the factory provided descriptions on websites. If you want your affiliate website to do well in search results, you should team with a search engine optimization consultant to improve the affiliate information you’ve been provided.
A similar situation involves medical and dental websites, which are provided by specialty website developers. The medical doctors and dentists don’t generally write much of the content on their websites, and these specialty developers provide 90 – 95% of what’s on the websites. Again, the content is high quality, but it’s not unique and Google and the other search engines know this. These cookie-cutter websites never do well in search results.
The last situation involves creating websites for the sole purpose of funneling visitor traffic to another website. A variation of this practice is buying a long list of keyword-rich domain names and then forwarding them to your business website. This tactic might have worked well some years ago, but it doesn’t work now. Since there’s no high-quality content associated with the forwarding domains, they won’t do well in search results and won’t have have any visitor traffic to forward.
Google’s Webmaster Tools has a video talking about these webspam content violations and here’s a link to watch it. Remember that Google and the other search engines are pretty good at spotting efforts to trick the system into higher rankings. You can bet that they’re going to be better at it next year! The smart thing for website owners and search engine optimization consultants to remember is that the search engines are looking for unique, relevant, high-quality website content — so why not work hard to provide it.
Call us at IX Brand SEO Services Company at 281-343-3284. We want to ride for your brand!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFxNda5Z4eE]
