SEO – Duplicate Contents
I have been increasing my understanding of the Duplicate contents and its effect on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) by way of some experimentation. To understand why should google not like the duplicate content – consider a hypothetical case where I am a blogger and I have 10 blog domains. With $10 an year it is really not difficult to get 10 domains. Now I write one unique article and assume that the keyword I choose is such that it results in only say 10,000 pages and its is easy to bring it to top in google. So I write one unique article and it comes to the top in the google. Now I have 9 more domains. So I go on and copy paste MY article on the 9 domains with more or less the same content. I apply the same SEO techniques and bring all 10 of them of page 1 and page 2 of google.
What this results in ? A search with the keywords results in pages that are all same in content. The google users will certainly not appreciate it. They would have liked different pages in the 1st and second pages. And precisely for this reason, google does not like the duplicate contents.
In many cases google will index only one page if you have multiple contents of about the same content. I experimented it with the following two blogs that had the same contents. There are only minor changes.
http://referencedesigner.com/blog/fujitsu-lifebook-mh380-netbook-review-seo-experiment-2/715/
http://referencedesigner.com/blog/fujitsu-lifebook-mh380-netbook-review-seo-experiment-1/712/
Both these pages were optimized for the keyword “fujitsu lifebook mh380 netbook review”. I found that google results only one page in the search result even though same number of the backlinks were created. Was this also because both the pages were on the same webite ? To examine this I wrote another blog at
http://janatanews.com/2009/dec/Fujitsu-Lifebook-MH380-Netbook-review.php
This blog too, had mostly the same content. I had expected it to come somewhere in the search result. It did not. That makes me conclude that
“Write original contents. Do not copy contents. It will not help you in SEO. You will not be able to rank high in search result.”
Note that, I am not yet considering the ethical practices of copy paste. They have their own implications and you can be caught for copyright violations for copying someone else’s contents. It is therefore imperative that you make it a habit of writing original contents in your blogs or website contents.
There are some finer points as well that you must pay attention. Assume that your webpages has a long disclaimer at the end of every page on your website. If that is the case and the actual content on the webpage is relatively small, then google can think that all pages have similar content ( the disclaimer), and may therefore mark pages at duplicate page. It is therefore necessary to keep the common content of the webpage to bare minimum. And if you need to write a short description with a url to the complete content.
Canonical url yet another topic that needs to be understood in this context. Probably in some other blog.