Internet marketing activities for your online business can be nearly a full-time job. Between social networking, content updating, blog commenting, article writing, and all the other things you do to increase traffic and conversions, there is usually little time left for other components in making our business a success.
It may sound like a good idea, at first thought, to minimise your efforts and save time by writing one article or blog post and putting it up at various sites throughout the internet or on different pages of the same domain – less effort, less time, and further reach, right?
We all want shortcuts that make our life easier, but posting Duplicate Content is probably not an effective way to market your e-commerce site unless it is done very carefully. Let’s take a look at why.
Non-Malicious Forms Of Duplicate Content
Chances are, you are not posting Duplicate Content merely to get to the top of the SERPs. It may be that your website sells various items that are cross-promoted or shown as related to other products. You might also have an alternate version of a page that is printer friendly, but still contains the exact same text.
In this case, there are some ways to get around being blacklisted by the major search engines. Google refers to the method of keeping certain pages from being indexed by their spiders as “canonicalization”.
This can be accomplished via a robots.txt file or by utilising meta tags that are specified to be “no index”. In this way, the search engine will only index one of the pages instead of both. If you have restructured or moved your website, use 301 directs to indicate that the domain has been relocated.
If you do not take steps to show the search engine the proper page to index, it will be done for you – and they will not necessarily show the one that is the best for your marketing efforts.
Black Hat Duplication
If you are posting duplicate content at various domains purely to save yourself time, Google and the other major search engines tend to see this as a black hat method of website optimisation.
If this happens, your website is doomed to suffer in the SERPs or be completely blacklisted, meaning that you have accomplished nothing more than making all of your online marketing efforts null and void.
Syndicated content – articles or posts used on others’ websites – won’t typically be indexed. If you want the SERP benefit of the same information being posted on other domains, then you will need to take the time to substantially change it.
Not all Duplicate Content is created for malicious intent, but saving time by posting the same text at various domains could be seen as such.
See you at the top of Google!
Sean Rasmussen
SEO Australia Pacific
AussieSEO.com © 2007 - 2010
Hi Sean,
I found the non-malicious form of duplicate content very interesting. I hadn’t even considered some of these things as being duplicate content but I guess they are.
I’m going to have to look in to learning how to set up a robots.txt file.
.-= Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Learn and Earn Competition – This is It =-.
Hi Sean
It is very clear from this article the price to pay for duplicating content, so basically, don’t do it .
It gets a bit tricky with cross-promoted items and you mention using robots.txt file. I would have to look into this if this was the case with my products in the future. At this time I only have 0ne blog, unfinished. The information is very important and I have saved the URL for future reference.
Thankyou.
.-= Elly´s last blog .. =-.
Unfortunately there are numerous ways you can unwittingly duplicate content. As Sean points out, you can hide what the search engines might erroneously take to be duplicate content is to maintain a robots.txt file for your site or utilize the “no index” meta tag.
Also, if you are planning on incorporating material into your articles that you came across as a result of online research be prepared to rewrite a significant portion of the material in your own words so it will not be misconstrued as duplicate content. I will normally jot down the basic facts in as few words as possible and then write the article without looking at the original material again.
.-= Don White´s last blog ..I Learn to Play Guitar – Part 1 =-.
Hi Sean,
I’m unsure about articles published on my blog. Can a blog post be also sent to an article directory once published on the blog or before being published on my blog?
If I submit an article to an article directory can I used it somewhere else at another time or would that be considered duplicating content?
.-= Jill Brown´s last blog ..Couples Marry at Common Law =-.
I don’t recommend publishing anything that you have on your blog elsewhere in its exact form. It’s always a good idea to rewrite the article before publishing it on other sites.