How Duplicate Content Hurts your Google Ranking

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is text that has been published online in more than one location, usually as a result of “copy and paste” blogging. When there are multiple instances of similar or identical articles across the web, search engines cannot determine which variation is more authoritative or relevant for a given search query. Google wants to ensure that search users get the best search experiences, as such, it will seldom reveal multiple duplicate versions of material. Therefore, the search engines choose which version is probably the original or the best. If you want to dominate search result pages with your content, MAKE SURE IT IS NOT THE SAME!

Google’s Issues with Duplicate Content

• Search engines do not know which sources to include/exclude from their indices
• Internet search engines don’t know whether to route the link metrics to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
• Online search engines often have no idea which version(s) to rank for best query results

As a result, if there is duplicate content present; website owners are likely to experience dropped positions and traffic losses.

How Google Handles Duplicate Content

There is a lot of confusing information about Google penalties for duplicate content. Who better to answer this question that Google itself…

“There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.” – Google

So, there is NO duplicate content penalty. BUT ranking could still be affected negatively.
Google tries hard to index and show pages with unique information. For example: if your website has a ‘regular’ and ‘printer’ variation of each article, and not blocked with a non-index meta tag, Google will choose one of them of the list.

“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.” – Google

In 2016, if Google identifies your duplicate material as ‘thin’ or ‘boiler-plate’ content, you have a serious problem which goes against Google’s internet performance referrals. And as you understand, this infraction needs to be ‘cleaned’ up.

Duplicated Content Hurts Google Ranking

Something to keep in mind is: do NOT expect Google to give you a high ranking when using content taken from other more trusted websites.

There are of course some exceptions to this since Google evaluates your own duplicate content on your own website in different ways. Your best chance of high ranking in 2016 is to have one solitary version of material on your site which is written specifically for that page. Google wants to reward unique, relevant, informative content in the organic search results. And to do this, Google’s quality bar has raised over the last couple of years.

How to Address Duplicate Content Issues on Your Own Website

Google published some steps you can take to address duplicate content issues and ensure that your users see the relevant material you want them to see. You can find those steps here.

Simple solution: Spin your Content

Spin software’s – there are many available – are used to spin content. It basically rewrites your article enough that search engines like Google think it’s an unique article. This ‘rewriting’ replaced words and phrases with synonyms and sometimes even changes entire sentence structures. These software’s can spin hundreds of items within minutes, ready for your use.
Sounds good right? … There’s a catch.

Why Spinning has a Bad Reputation

Among many people, spinning content has a bad image. This is all due to people throwing their article in a spinning software and letting the software do all the work.

This produces low-quality content. And with low quality, I mean unreadable versions of an article with sentences that don’t make any sense. Throwing an item through spinning software and don’t tweak anything yourself is the fastest way to ruin good content!

The second problem with spinning is that it’s the same idea and concept as the original article, only using different words and phrases. You’re basically saying the same thing in a variety of ways.

There is a fantastic tool for generating high quality, unique variations of content, and with excellent grammar. We cover this tool in our next article where we discuss “How to Get High-Quality Content through Spinning“