SEO, Duplicate content, penalising
Copying any content from somewhere should always be avoided. If you are a website owner you should always try to see that the contents in your website are not copied from somwhere else and pasted on your website. A copy pasted content has SEO implications besides copyright issues.
Google always check if the content on your webites is a copy of some other content. If it is, it penalises the website. The website that is penalised is the one that is indexed later. Once penalised it will be difficult to bring the website on the top of the search engine.
Use Copyscape
If you are using a content writer to write content for your website, always check copyscape to ensure that the contents are original and the sentences are not copied from somewhere else. As an added precaution, make some editing changes here and there after you receive the contents from a content writer.
Implication on changing the website url
Many times website owners are told that their urls are not user friendly. So an earlier url that was something like
http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234
is changed to
http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla
Now, the content of the two links are same. The content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla is same as the content of the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/profileid?=1000000234. Since the url http://yourdomain.com/profile/vikasshukla was created later, google may think that this is a copy paste of an original content and may penalise this link. Google then penalises the web page that was created later on. In other words, we loose the advantage of making the url SEO friendly.
What should you do
You must involve an SEO expert at the begining of the architecture of a website design. Changing the url for making the SEO frienly may not be best option. This highlights just one of the several aspects of the making a website SEO friendly.
Vikas Shukla is the lead architect of Hardware Design at BL Healthcare. He also provides consultancy for SEO and social media marketing.