Far too many times in the online printing industry, I have seen newly created online printing sites simply copy the content from other top companies (their direct competition), yes copy the exact contents word for word, and just use their own company name. You put so much time into the actual design of a website, why get lazy with the actual content? The content portion of your website is a very important part of your website. The content is the actual wording that the search engines use to know what your site is about. If all your content is copied, this puts your website at a grave disadvantage.
What happens when you copy a websites content?
When you copy a websites content and place it on your own website page(s), you are creating duplicate content. This is bad. With duplicate content you most likely will have problems ranking. The reason is that the main website with the content is seen as the originator of the content, the content owner. These pages have already been indexed in Google/BING, and the search engines are aware of these pages. You invest a lot of time and money into the actual design, the content portion is just as important. Search engines do not want to see the exact same content displayed within the top results.
When you go to create a website, you normally don’t want to create an exact copy of someone else’s design right? This can affect how your brand looks, and cause some confusion with potential customers. So why copy the content? The actual content lets the search engines know what your website is all about, and if you copy someone else’s content, this puts your website at a disadvantage from the get go.
What are the implications of copied content?
The simplest answer is lower rankings or no rankings or Google may just ignore the duplicate content. The other potential issue the site in question can face is a DCMA removal request with the major search engines. This is something that you want to avoid. This will put the affected pages/domain that were submitted, removed from the search engines.
You have to remember that most top websites periodically scan for copied/duplicate content, and it will only be a matter of time before your site is found. If your website is just in the design stages and not officially launched, block it from the search engines. For sample text to fill up the pages, use dummy text (Lorem Ipsum) to fill your pages.
Duplicate Content within your own website
Within your own website, there are times where the search engines can index multiple versions of the same page, and this can cause duplicate content. With the example below, all 6 urls below are for the same page, but they are all for the same page. Hopefully you know that having six versions of your same page does not mean that you will have six times the chances to rank better, so why assume that copied content from other websites will be any different?
- http://www.1sampleexample.com
- http://www.1sampleexample.com/
- http://www.1sampleexample.com/index.htm
- http:// 1sampleexample.com
- http:// 1sampleexample.com/
- http:// 1sampleexample.com/index.htm
In these cases you will want to set one page as the main. There are measures that can be taken within your website to help prevent and deal with these issues. You only want one page to be listed and funnel all the Link Juice to the one main url.
Always take the time to create (not duplicate) content. Invest in creating unique quality content for your website
Gerard Manning is the owner of Manning Search Marketing and has been working in the SEO industry since 2000. Originally started with Enquiro Search Solutions (now known as Mediative). Was previously a Research Assistant on Inside the Mind of the Searcher that was released in 2005.