Posted on December 18, 2013 by admin
We time and again come across this expression that ‘content is the king’. But, what about duplicate content? With all the Google updates making inroads into cleaning the web information, how much can duplicate content cost you or for that your website performance? Whether you web content is copied from some other source or some other website has copied the content from you, your website content is duplicate, alright!
A new webmaster video for today: "How does Google handle duplicate content?" http://t.co/QMYBzRFFcW
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 16, 2013
The last of the Google Updates, Hummingbird, further stresses on the need of unique content on a website. If your website has all the ingredients to take it to the top, it can fall flat on its face with the presence of duplicate content , no matter how small it is! The search engine giant has constantly been a reckoning force in giving the right directions to the websites and online businesses to put information that is useful to the end users. Anyone who uses Google to search products, services or find information needs to be provided with what is best and what is quality on the Internet.
Duplicate content to a great extent can cost you the very existence of your website. If you have a website that is ranking high on the search engines and it suddenly slumps down, then you are making a big mistake by not checking for duplicate content off and on. It is one of the major hindrances that companies and website businesses face today as they head towards claiming their websites as Google-friendly or Google-optimized.
As per Google’s Matt Cutts, about 25-30% of web content is duplicate content. He further stresses that it is not a very alarming situation for Google or for the net surfers. But, what is interesting to note is that if you are among the 25-30% of the websites with duplicate content, then prepare yourself to be penalized. The websites, who are party in the act, get a heavy denting on their search engine ranking. They lose their top search engine ranking and are even dumped way past the 100th-page mark.
Even though Google refrains from treating duplicate content as spam as not every website can manage to put fresh content on it or keep a check on the theft of their original content, it still penalizes the website in the form of losing top search engine rankings. Any website with duplicate content is not a spam but it is not worthy of enjoying the privilege of top ranking either.