Today, I’d like to take a quick minute to talk about one of the most damaging things someone can do to their website, without even realizing they’re doing it: duplicate content.

Google has always worked toward finding the most relevant, quality websites on the internet, and basically scoring them from “best” to “worst” in their search results. They have their list of rules that your website needs to follow or otherwise, you won’t show up in the results. Right?

Well, what happens when two websites are more or less the same? How does Google know which one is better than the other? They don’t. They might even punish both. If the text on one website is the same as another, how can they tell which has the better quality content? They’re the same! We’ve seen a bunch of sites go down in rankings because they have the same content as another website.

Here are some ways that your site can have duplicate content:

• Your website is creating pages that have the same content (rss feeds, blog rolls, etc.)
• You copied and pasted the content from somewhere else (yes, this includes your Facebook page, etc.)
• Someone stole it (scoundrels!)

All of these things can hurt your rankings. If you’re trying to rank for Fort Collins SEO, and you copied and pasted a bunch of content from somewhere else, it’s going to be much more difficult to make it work.

Plain and simple: make sure your website doesn’t have anything duplicated on it. Not sure if you’re being punished for duplicate content? Visit copyscape.com and type in your website’s address. This will tell you what you need to know.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment!

Chris