Loading ...Have you ever noticed that short cuts often take away something for what they give in terms of time? How often have you darted down a side-street, hoping to escape heavy traffic, only to find yourself winding around speed humps and other obstacles? How many times have you spent hours reading the manual for a new time-saving device? Short cuts often seem like a good idea at the time, but a significant percentage of them are not.
Replicating content is one such short cut. A large number of site owners, needing content for their SEO, simply take content from their other pages. It’s something that seems only too easy. All you have to do is highlight, copy, and paste, and your content problem is solved.
As any search engine optimisation expert will tell you, duplicating your content is a bad idea. Most site owners are aware that purchasing an article that has already been used on several other sites is not going to assist their SEO. It’s not quite as clear that taking content from your own pages will be an equally futile endeavour.
Why you shouldn’t use your own content
As the content on a site’s pages is generally owned by the site owner, there seems to be little risk in copying it across several pages. Unlike lifting content from someone else’s site, you’re not going to have an irate site owner track you down when what you’re copying is already yours. The reason not to copy, though, is pretty much the same as the reason not to take content from another website.
The main reason to avoid duplication is that it causes confusion. Not only are search engine spiders likely to give up after only one version of the page, the search engines will only choose one version to be indexed. You have no control over which version of the page is chosen, meaning that the page which was once a money-maker might get thrown away in favour of a boring filler page.
A further problem exists in that search engine spiders may choose to give up on your site if they find a number of duplicates. You can talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about how to encourage spiders to crawl your site fully.
Avoid accidental duplications
It is not uncommon for pages to be accidentally duplicated within a site, and this is just as serious a problem as deliberate duplication. It usually happens when pages are updated. Often, having more than one person involved in the project can result in the page being posted twice, although it’s possible to do even when working on your own.
A close watch should be kept on your site’s architecture as you add new pages. This should be done anyway, to ensure that your architecture stays as solid as it was when you first optimised. When performing SEO maintenance on your navigation, keep an eye out for accidentally duplicated pages, text and files. It’s a small mistake, but one that is easy to make.
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Tags: content, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consult, spiders
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