How Can Duplicate Content Hurt My Ranking?

So you’ve got you new website, your domain name is registered and you’ve got your hosting sorted out – now all you need are visitors! But hold on – there are millions of websites out there, so how are people going to find yours?  

It is a fact that the majority of people use a search engine in order to find what they’re looking for online and there is a great deal of speculation about the best way of attracting them to your website rather than your competitors. If you want visitors to come to your site you must find a way of getting listed in search engine results pages (SERPS).  But which one?

Accounting for over 75% of global searches at a February of 2010, Google is the undisputed leader in the world of search engines. It is also a fact that people searching for something on Google will not look further than page 1 in most cases, very few continuing to page 2. The harsh reality is that if you’re not on page 1 in Google you are nowhere. So what is the best strategy for ensuring that your site reaches page 1?

According to Google themselves web page content should be written for human beings and not search engines. Google’s raison d’être is relevance – the better the content matches the keywords searched for, the higher the page will be ranked, so the more relevant content the page contains the better.

The algorithms used by Google and other search engines are very sophisticated these days and take into account many factors including the time it takes other pages to load, the number of other sites that link to that page, how relevant the content is to the keywords, and the amount of traffic the site receives. The actual algorithm, just like Coca-Cola’s recipe, is a closely guarded secret but occasionally Google gives away an insight as to how their algorithm calculates the relevance of the page.

At one time it was possible to fool the search engine by keyword stuffing the content of your page; this is no longer the case, as the algorithm can detect such measures. The people at Google are no fools and they have developed their algorithms to weed out fraudulent content. Content that is appreciably the same could be construed as duplicate content, as could other “black hat” techniques like creating other pages that contain the same content purely for the purposes of manipulating search results.

This may be completely innocent in its purpose, however, such as creating a page of identical content formatted specifically for printing.  In this case, you should tell Google which page you want listed as the premier URL for the page – a process known as canonicalization.   You could also use a “no follow” meta tag in the head of your print friendly page to prevent search engines indexing that page.

If Google suspects that you are trying to fool it to artificially elevate your ranking position it will penalize you by either not indexing your site, or worse still, “sandboxing” it meaning that it will be placed in a quarantine area where no one will see it.  Having said that, Google are also very proactive in terms of helping people optimise their websites and provide a number of very useful tools including a keyword selection tool, free of charge.        Their stated purpose is to provide the visitor with accurate and relevant information.

Google suggests a variety of measures to avoid having duplicate content indexed including:

  • Using 301 redirects
  • Using top-level domains
  • Using their own Webmaster tools
  • Using syndication carefully
  • Minimizing repetition by linking to, for example, a terms and conditions page
  • Using consistency in linking internally

Consequently it is of major importance to anybody attempting to get their website ranked highly on Google to have content that is fresh, original, and most certainly unique. There are many ways to achieve this, one of the most successful being actively represented on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and Bebo.

A more recent phenomenon has been the rise of the blog as a new form of social media. Leaving relevant comments on blogs is a good way to distribute the address of your website for nothing, as is writing articles and contributing to forums.  Whatever approach you choose you must also ensure that other websites to link back to yours, so having fresh, relevant content is good reason for other Webmasters to want to link to you.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 10th, 2011 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Blog, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

 

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