One of the biggest discussion points in the world of Search Engine Optimisation is Duplicate Content. It is often discussed in reference to penalties that have been imposed by Google. However this is quite an exaggeration of the facts as websites are hardly ever penalised by Google for duplicate content, but individual pages may suffer.
There are outcomes that are much more realistic and Alban Creative have highlighted these potential issues for you below:
- Google Crawl Issues. If your website has internal duplicate content then this will effect negatively on your website as Google’s crawling can be effected by it. So the amount of your websites pages that Google and other search engines crawl will go to waste as it will spend time crawling two identical pages on your site. So therefore your websites most important pages could potentially be crawled less frequently than ideal.
- Links Diluted. As with internal duplicate content this is also relevant for external duplication. The power of your links that you have built can be hugely affected. The powerful links that you have built to your website which is known as link juice can suffer dilution and this is one of the most important of SEO negatives relating to duplicate content. You may have two url’s with the same content and both of them may have back links pointing to both separate url’s. You could have pointed all of the links to just the one page giving it more credibility with Google. The only way you will benefit more is if one of them has a permanent 301 redirect pointing to the original page or the more powerful/popular of the two pages.
- One Page Ranking For Keywords. The discovery of duplicate content by Google could have the most negative effect by not ranking the page you want it to. When they find duplicate content, it will more often than not only rank one of them in relation to search queries — and it can never be guaranteed that it will be the page on your website that you wanted to rank, or even a page from your website.
All we will say is make sure that you always write unique content on your website and don’t repeat large chunks of your text on various pages of your site. You can easily avoid pages on your website being punished by ensuring that every page is unique.
