The dangers of Using duplicate content on the Web
It is true to say that many many websites today are using exactly the same content as hundreds of other sites. Many of these are selling electrical goods, cameras etc and are using the maufacturers description, while others are selling holidays or overseas property. Often the content of the site is an XML feed, that is taken in by the site and used to fill its databases and pages. Result, a site that uses the same words as its competitors...
What are the dangers?
From a human point of view, the dangers look zero, after all the manfacturer of the product knows how to describe their goods better than the website owner, so what is the problem? Well actually it is not the human visitor we are worried about at all, but the Search Engines themselves. Why?, because when they see that the page contains a lot of words (in exactly the same order etc) as an other page, they simply decide not to bother with it, and thus it will never be listed in the results, which in turn means that one method of bringing people into the site has gone, and for some, the Engines are the main way that the site gets its visitors.
I have seen this problem re-enacted on countless sites and the result it always the same, loss of Search Engine traffic, sometimes completely, the entire site being labled as just a copy. One of my customers a site well known for providing excellent advice and offers on overseas property has suffered from this situation just recently, my searches for text on their site coming up with other sites but not theirs
In their case they had used the same text as dozens of other sites for property that they could sell, whilst in other cases, they had used what was unique text from their site on a number of high profile property portals and because the Engines noticed the text on the portals first, thought that the copy on the ourhomeabroad site was the copy and hence ingnored it.
The Morale of the story
If you can avoid it, don't use feeds from other sites as copy on your site and perhaps even more important, don't use exact copies of the words on your site on any high profile sites, as it could well be that these will be crawled by the Engines first and that your site will be labled a copy and accordingly ignored.
For more information about using the Web to promote your business see the expert online marketing articles on www.intelligent-online-marketing.com
Comments