Duplicate Content Dangers

A recent article on NZS.com stated that for the best search engine optimisation, item of content on your website should be original; not previously published elsewhere on the Internet. The reason for that is that copying content from other websites and republishing it on your site harm your search engine ranking because search engines like to present searchers with unique content from the original source.

If you some information on your website from another web source, you need to change it from the original. You can use content from another site and republish it if you add additional text to that content  - then your rankings won't suffer. Just make sure you are crediting the original source - most commonly done in the form of quoting. Search engines do understand what you are doing here, and won't penalise you for it if you're not maliciously copying content.

What about duplicating content from within your own site, on different pages on one domain? As a general rule, duplicate content, while not preferable for SEO, will not be frowned upon unless the content intends to be deceptive or manipulative of search engine results. Search engines do a good job of choosing a version of your content to show in their search results, and will not fault you for having a little repetitive content within the pages in your website.

You might also be worrying about continually linking to the same URL within one page, as there is often talk around the web that search engines see repetitive linking within a single page to one destination to be link stuffing. This talk is not a myth, but there are ways around it.

Search engines are determined to provide users with a level of variety, they try to filter pages with duplicate URL linking so that users experience less redundancy when searching - so the search engines will select what they think the 'best' version of that link is in their results. However, a search engine's idea of the best link and your idea of the most important one within your page might be different. To get around this, you can simply let search engines know which URL is most important to add weight to in your Sitemap. Alternatively, use 'no follow' links, which don't hold any search engine weight, but will still be useful for your users to get them to the URLs you want to repetitively link them to.

Duplicated linking, if for no other reason, will deter search engines from effectively crawling your actual content. If their bots are spending a lot of time crawling multiple URL links within your page, eventually determining that they lead to the same place, they will have less time to get to the rest of your content because of your site's bandwidth.

Duplicate content can affect your site's SEO in several ways, but as long as you are not publishing identical content, it's unlikely that you'll see your web pages penalised in their search engine rankings.