What is Duplicate content and how can you prevent it?

Good quality content plays a significant role in SEO. Regularly updating your website with well-written, high quality content is important for various reasons:

• It displays your knowledge and expertise.
• Helps prospective customers to make clever buying decisions.
• Increases the traffic to your site.
• Brings in more inbound links.
• Generates more revenue

However,the sad story is that most businesses tend to neglect this vital aspect of the SEO process.

Quite often, companies prefer a beautifully designed website with poor content, rather than a poor looking website with well-written content. In certain cases, companies who want to reap the benefits of good content, but who don’t want to take up the trouble of producing it, or paying a freelancer to create it, tend to copy content from other websites. Copying text or images from other websites is really easy but it is one of the worst things that can happen to your business.

What is Duplicate content?

Duplicate content is an SEO term that refers to website content that’s similar or almost similar in nature. In fact, around 25-30 percent of the entire web content is more or less duplicate content. Practically, all types of online content is covered by copyright law and there are penalties for violating the rules. Google penalizes content that’s purposely duplicated across domains in an effort to manipulate search engine rankings or drive more traffic.

Bad duplicate content basically involves a website that has automatically generated text or a website that cuts and pastes content from other sites.

Acceptable duplicate content includes original content that adds value to the website. On the other hand, if the purpose of the duplicate content is to enhance the user experience, then your website is on the proper track. Acceptable duplicate content essentially includes product specifications, lists of ingredients, Technical or legal language, websites with identical copy on multiple country domains, and printer-only versions of web pages.

If your website has bad duplicate content, Google would remove it entirely from its search index. This means, your site would no longer appear in Google's search results. Duplicate content can also result in dilution of link popularity and weakening of a site’s domain.

How to prevent Duplicate content:

• Title Tags should be unique for each web page and must precisely explain the objective. This enables search engines to distinguish the pages on your website.
• Choose your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools as it conveys to Google the domain you would like for indexing the pages in your website.
• Analyze and review your website’s content to make sure that the copy is completely unique and original.
• When you are creating copy for a web page using data that has been sourced from another website, do ensure that you are presenting a new perspective. If around 60 percent of the copy is cited, ensure that the rest of the 40 percent is original.

Zyxware offers you content writing services that not only provide you high search engine rankings but also build brand value in the market. We have an experienced team of professional content writers who provide original, high-quality content based on your specific business objectives. We offer you optimized, custom content that engages and informs your audience and is in tune with your editorial plan. Our content development services basically include Lead Generating Campaigns, email campaigns, Social Media content, blog posts, articles, SEO Website Content, Press releases, Case studies, and Newsletters.

If you wish to avail any of our content development services, please get in touch with us.