As we keep re-iterating, good quality content is crucial if you are to do well in the search engine rankings. Duplicate content can be an absolute disaster to your organic SEO campaign, here's how.

The search engine bots crawl billions of web pages on a daily basis and index all readable pages. Search engines then cross-check any content indexed with it's pre-existing cached content to ensure that there are no duplicates. The major search engines strive to ensure only quality content can be found in their index's and one of the biggest rules that each engines has is making sure that there is no duplicate content. Long gone are the days where you can poach other peoples literature to organically rank well - it just doesn't work any more - it's serious quality control.

There has always been an ongoing discussion in the search engine optimisation community as to what exactly consitutes as duplicate content? How much duplication is too much duplication? The truth is, there is no set guidelines to this and the reason for that is simple - search engines do not want you to duplicate - period.

You can always find out if people are duplcating your content, www.copyscape.com is a purpose built search engine solely to weed out anybody thinking they can get away with duplicate content.

Our advice is simple. Write your own content. Duplicate content DOES come with prices (hefty ones too) - it's not unheard that people have dropped entirely from Google's index from duplicating content.

Create interesting, engaging content - the search engine rankings along with your off-page search engine optimisation efforts will soon pay dividends.

Posted: 16/08/10 08:01