Does Duplicate Content Hurt Your SEO?

If you’re serious about SEO and it’s benefits for your site and business, you must have wondered whether duplicate content really affects your site’s ranking. Can you just copy and paste amusing content from let’s say a Wikipedia page and use it on your website – and still rank? Well, the quick answer is ‘No’. You can’t do that and still rank.

Why?

Because Google already had that page indexed. This article will break down the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to duplicate content and SEO. So, does duplicate content hurt your SEO?

What Does Google Say About Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content on a website refers to content that entirely or appreciably matches another website’s content on the web. Duplicate content is categorized into namely: internal duplicate content and external duplicate content. Internal duplicate content refers to a single domain that forms duplicate content via several internal URLs (on the same site). External duplicate content on the other hand refers to more than one domain having the same page copy indexed by Google’s search engine.

It’s important to note that both of these categories of duplicate content can happen as either exact duplicates or as almost-duplicate.

Does duplicate content hurt SEO?

According to Google themselves, there’s nothing like a ‘duplicate content penalty’. It’s a myth. However, Google filters similar content on the web and this can affect your website’s SEO ranking. What happens is, when you copy content from another website, Google gets confused and it has to decide which of the two sites it should rank at the top.

In such a scenario, Google normally has two choices: either to display it or not to display it. Google may decide to display duplicate content in the search results if it sees the content as relevant to what the user is looking for. For example, news articles may display certain statements repeatedly when something happens.

Google may also decide not to display the copied content. When this happens, Google may separate your content into what’s called Google Omitted Results. If you continually spam the internet with duplicate content, Google may stop indexing your website going forward.

As a result, duplicate content can be harmful to your SEO efforts. Instead of copying content from other websites, SEO professionals recommend creating valuable original content for your target audience. Learn how to come up with an SEO content writing strategy that’ll drive more traffic from search engines to your business’s website!

Would you like to rank on the first page of Google but just don’t know where to start? SEO Guru Atlanta is a SEO specialist in Cumming that helps businesses like yours rank on Google’s search engine. Call at (678) 520-9925 for a free consultation!

Concerned about duplicate content hurting your SEO? SEO Guru Atlanta’s Content writing services in Cumming will help you with all your duplicate content and SEO queries. Simply call (678) 520-9925 to get started!