Will duplicate content marketing damage my businesses SEO?

You may well be just setting up a new business, or you may well be thinking about getting your existing website redesigned?

At the same time, you may currently be thinking over a cup of coffee how can you obtain more customers for your business?

That’s to say you may well be considering which advertising methods may work best for your business.

Are you going to invest in say PPC (Pay Per Click), flyers, or perhaps organic search engine optimisation?

And if you decide that search engine optimisation is the best method of advertising, well, there’s loads to think about.

That’s to say, sure there’s loads and loads of marketing agencies to choose from, but you do have to choose a company that will offer you quality work (white hat).

We would highly recommend not just opting for the cheapest quote- that’s simply because you will need to find agencies that only offer high-quality work.

Yet, with that said, some companies may try and do the seo work themselves.

After all, how hard can it be?

Well, here’s the thing, some people may say that organic seo is an absolute piece of cake, but it isn’t- but don’t just take our word for it.

One of the more common problems that can occur when a business implements seo themselves is they place duplicate text onto their company website, and this can cause “duplication issues”.

This may cause a Panda penalty– this basically means that the business may have copied text, say from another businesses blog, and then pasted it on their own.

Part of Google’s algorithm is designed to weed out spam, that’s to say if the SEO work is not up to standard, the algorithm can spot that the work is weak, or low-quality and move the website out of the index.

So, let’s say for example your about to launch a new business, and your business sells smartphones.

Yet instead of writing a product description yourself for each smartphone that you sell, well, instead you may copy and paste from a supplier’s website instead- and does that sound like a good idea?

Well, no- that’s because this will cause duplication issues

And because the duplicated content has been pasted onto your website, by way of copying product descriptions, this means your website could be hit by a penalty, such as a Panda penalty.

So, what’s the solution?

The solution is you should only work with a marketing company that offers high-quality work.

Because let’s face it, when we are looking to find a company, well who looks on page 4 of Google?

So, this is why all seo needs to be high-quality.

And as this article focuses on the Google Panda penalty and duplicated text, well, we would highly recommend that only quality content marketing that is white hat, and adheres to Google’s rules is added to your company’s website.

So, for example, let’s say that you run a solicitor’s practice and your business is based in Cardiff Bay.

Now, one marketing agency states lets add a blog post about the company once a week, they say the blog post should be 300 words, and they recommend that the blog post states what the company has been doing in terms of networking events that the business has attended, plus also awards that the company has obtained- does this sound a good idea?

Well, we would say no, we would say its far better for your solicitors to concentrate on what areas of law you wish to promote, and then write articles which are very well written, and are useful to your customers, and answer questions that your business most commonly gets asked.

So, for example, let’s say you run a solicitor’s practice, and you specialise in the area of divorce, well why not have your marketing company work with an experienced solicitor to write an article such as, what will happen to the family home after we divorce?

This may well be a commonly asked question that divorce solicitors get asked, one where many people need to find an answer to that question, so if the work is good quality, and by that we mean white hat, well your businesses SEO may well improve.

So, what is duplicated content?

Simply put its content, whether that be an entire chunk of text, or just one line of text that’s copied from another website.

And yes, Google’s algorithm is that sophisticated that it can spot duplicated content.

A common mistake that some businesses make is to think, well if I copy that blog post Google will think that I wrote the blog post, however Google’s algorithm is very clever, it will know which business wrote the article and which business is the author.

Our recommendation is to only use original content, that your business has written.

Plagiarism checker

There are many plagiarism checkers that can help to detect duplicated content.

Google’s algorithm

Google’s algorithm rewards quality SEO.

Does your business require help with its content marketing?

If your business needs help creating content marketing, or help with your business’s SEO in general, then we can help.