Does Duplicate Web Page Content Matter?
It is true that duplicate content on a website can be harmful to your SEO efforts. It goes without saying that it's important to ensure all of your content is both "original" and of high "quality". Of course.
However, too often we're told that Google doesn't "like it" when websites have too much duplicate content. These pages won't and don't rank as well. But apparently, some content duplication is allowed. Websites such as online stores and forums have a lot of duplicate content.
Google sees duplicate content as acceptable and offers guidance (officially) on how to handle it.
Confused yet?
In this blog post, we will discuss the acceptable amount of duplicate content according to Google's guidelines.
This is an excerpt from Google's guidelines:
"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."
There are literally hundreds of SEOs testing the duplicate content "theory", and the general consensus is that it doesn't matter for ranking unless it exceeds 50%. And even then it usually doesn't matter.
The practical reality is that it takes enormous amounts of server resources to identify duplicate content by cross-comparing content between different websites. Search engine resources are limited to only identify duplicate content if it's glaringly obvious, and designed to manipulate search engine results.
Having many - even thousands of pages of content on a website that cover the same topics, but are well written and provide real visitor value is NOT duplicate content. After all, you could hire an army of writers to re-write content for each page. Or use Spindlie to do it for you, and there are real humans behind Spindlie's content creation platform.
Our perspective is based on the following factors:
- Publishing over 40,000 pages of content over 5 years
- A large variety of different subject matter on hundreds, and sometimes on thousands of pages per website
- Google's updates have actually bumped our rankings
How Not to Have Your Content Flagged As Duplicate
The answer lies in considering 2 factors:
- Quality of content
- The intent behind the content
Our Content Creation Strategy
We created Spindlie over 5 years. For more details, check out the blog article"How Spindlie Works As a Content Creation Platform: Under the Hood" for a better understanding of how Spindlie got started.
Spindlie has enabled us to:
- Create content, which is on average, of much higher quality than what is found on an average web page
- Offer much more content and information to web page visitors than most web pages when compared to competitors
- Create content that attracts - and retains page visitors
- Create content that "converts" and results in the visitor taking "action" by clicking "click to call", texting the phone number, or filling out a form
- Create content where each and every page is branded to a real business, and localized to a city or town served by the business
What's the Purpose of Content Creation?
There are 2 things that we, as web marketers, do with content:
- Create, finesse and optimize content for web pages for ourselves or clients, to generate conversions/sales.
- Pump out a massive quantity of crappy content to networks and 2nd/3rd tier properties used for supportive backlinks.
Frankly, we don't do #2, because we don't need to. Not to mention, more and more network owners want quality content. Why? Not because of Google's wrath, but because they're monetizing their own properties with YOUR content. Nothing wrong with that by the way, if it's a win-win. You get the backlink, and they make money from the site.
Consider this...
If you open 100 web pages of 100 plumbing sites (any niche will do), how many variations of phrases like "give us a call", or "we offer the best guarantee", or "we provide excellent service" are there? Tons. There are only so many ways to say the same thing - about the same topic, that make any sense at all to a real human.
So duplicate content is NOT an issue as long as your aim is CONVERSION of the visitor using "common" terminology. Try no to stretch the spins into permutations and combinations that no one (except a non-native English speaker) would say.
Don't Over-Spin Your Content
That leads to another point about spinning. The limit of the potential variations is governed by how people actually express themselves - and NOT by the total number of possible (illegible, non-converting, crappy) variations you can pump out.
The bottom line? Be natural, reduce your variations and ONLY include combinations that make sense at a glance. Anything more will hurt your business. But not because of anything other than the fact that you'll lose credibility with your visitors.
Google won't care as long as the visitor hangs around, sees value, and takes action. After all, doesn't that make YOUR web-page the best result in the SERPs?
One final point. Google's and every other search engines very existence depends on serving up the "best and most relevant" page for your query, at least for products and services.
If you kept seeing electrical service companies when looking for a plumber, you'd drop using Google in a heartbeat. This may be an extreme example, but the reality holds. Search engines must - by definition - serve up the pages that are most relevant, hold the visitor's attention the longest, and/or where they take the most "action".
That's it. Great content wins the money game.