Duplicating already published content is bad for your online presence.
Duplicating already published content is bad for your online presence.For those looking to expand their business description and/or better explain products or services online, it might seem like a great idea to find content inspiration or even pre-written information from already published websites. Of course, the world wide web provides countless channels for marketing content, so it seems like the web would be a great, natural outlet to use in order to “get the word out” to as many markets as possible. While on the surface this might sound like a great idea, in truth, using duplicate or copied content online will actually do more harm than good, due to search engines that are continually crawling the web looking for duplicate, even plagiarized content. It’s been proven time and time again that duplicate content will not help your business to rank higher in the search engines. By creating genuine and unique content, you’ll be giving your website a viable boost online!
Impact on Search Engines and SEO Rankings
On the plus side, search engines perform a valuable service when they crawl through the web in order to find content relevant to the user’s search query. Search engines want to present the most applicable and up-to-date information for those using their search service. In most cases, content publishers are performing a legitimate service as well, merely trying to connect with audiences. On the downside, sometimes a search engine will have difficulty trying to determine if a content publisher is legitimate or if they are conducting some type of scam through duplicate content or even posting plagiarized content. This makes the job of assigning an accurate ranking more challenging, but also more important.
Content Marketing Issues and Penalization
Duplicate or syndicated content may very well be legitimate but it poses some special issues for search engines, such as trying to determine which version(s) to include in their indices, then determining the order of ranking for query results and whether to direct link metrics (authority, trust, etc.) to one or all versions of the same content. As a result, the confusion resulting from incorrectly evaluating duplicated or syndicated information can cause the search engine to lower the ranking of the content, therefore penalizing the “copy-cat”.
To summarize, duplicate content will not only hurt your businesses online ranking, and shoot your credibility to potential clients online, but it also defeats the purpose of having any of the content or keyword strategy. It’s not worth it.
