Duplicate Content - An Example and a Bit of Advice
Yep, the argument about duplicate content and whether Google punishes duplicate content or not has been fought for ages.
Personally, I believe that content that is duplicated inside your own website IS a bad thing, i.e. the same content on different pages within your website. However, I've never lost sleep wondering whether my articles are too similar to others across the web.
Anyway, I was doing some random browsing on Google today and for one of the keywords I searched, there are 2 websites in the top 10 (#1 and #9 respectively) that have the EXACT same content.
The same headline.
The same meta description.
The same article word for word.
The same images.
Different domains.
I found it interesting that both articles managed to get indexed on page 1 of Google for the same keyword (770 000 000 competing pages).
To me, this shows again that Google doesn't really care if your article is 99% the same as another article elsewhere on the internet.
Now I am not saying you should go and copy & paste 1000 unedited PLR articles on your website because Google doesn't penalize duplicate content.
As far as I see it, if the same article can exist in numerous places all over the internet, your aim should be to make your article jump out and grab the reader.
That means making your article unique in terms of being written with the CUSTOMER in mind, NOT the search engine's spiders.
This is where I feel most people lose the plot. Too much is made of rewriting content just to make it 30% unique from other articles for the sake of rankings.
Not enough emphasis is placed on rewriting articles so that they grab the attention of the reader, hold the attention of the reader, and inspire the reader to take the next step.
That takes more than rearranging a few sentences and throwing in some synonyms.
So if you are rewriting articles, make sure its for the right reasons
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats