Keeping your news, insights, or blog column up to date with valuable information for your audience is an effective digital strategy but copying pages and/or content from other websites is not the ideal way to do it.

Recently, we’ve seen a lot of brands adding duplicated page content to their site pages. The competition to maintain a stream of visitor & niche customers to your website and waiting rooms is as ferocious as ever, in the world of digital marketing, industry best practices can change regularly.

Building a site with duplicated content from competitors or other sites can result in very poor user experience and might impact your web ranking when targeted consumers search for your service. Google won’t necessarily penalize you for copied content on your site, but having the same copy of content with other sites will make it difficult to rank highly. Consequently, this leads to random or inconsistent ranking decisions and makes it practically difficult to overtake competitors.

Advice from SEO Specialists & Google

We strongly recommend affixing your brand to original content — our insight is echoed that of leading SEO experts, as well as Google themselves.
Quoted below is a Moz article snippet:

“While not technically a penalty, duplicate content can still sometimes impact search engine rankings. When there are multiple pieces of, as Google calls it, “appreciably similar” content in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.”

And here’s what Google has to say about posting duplicated content:

“In some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in poor user experience when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate your rankings and deceive your users, 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.”

Checking Your Website for Duplicate Content

CopyScape is one tool we recommend in determining whether or not your site is using potentially duplicate content. This tool will search the webspace and returns a report that shows you examples of other sites using the same copy as yours.

What Should I Do if I Find Copied Content on My Site?

  • Purge all copied content & pages from your website
  • Identify and rewrite the 10 most important pages, at a minimum.
  • Write new content with basic search engine optimization guidelines in mind, such as mentioning the name of the city your business is in and using high-traffic terms in H1 and H2 headers. Example Digital marketing consultancy in Nairobi, Kenya
  • After restructuring the site and removing pages with duplicate content, you should ensure that those pages have a permanent 301 redirect in place. This way, if a search engine bot crawls a page and sees the 301 redirects, it will reach the intended, newly written page.
  • If you manage multiple websites with the similar subject matter, resist the urge to reuse or remodel blocks of content across them. Maintaining original content across your site will ensure your SEO efforts are optimized and give visitors the most accurate information possible.

For more guidance on creating original content, or tips on how you can make the most of your marketing budget, don’t hesitate to reach out.