Truth About Duplicate Content
- SEO |
Definition of "duplicate content", content on the same domain, point!
Does that mean you can just clone a site and get away with it?
Yes and No.
Yes if you have a very impressive backlink profile already.
No if you start with some brand new or weak domain, that's why those auto scraped sites and auto blogs don't work that well anymore.
Simple like that.
Can you get away with duplicate content on the same domain?
No and Yes
No when you post the same article many times, who would even do that? No one but people do it and change a few words in each article, like replacing a city name to target more locations / area's. Doesn't work.
Yes when it's caused by category, author, tag, date type of archives assuming you use canonical tags on post/page level. Your posts/pages won't rank any worse cause of that.
HOWEVER:
If you plan to rank your categories or homepage that's filled with those read more snippets, (that are in fact a copied paragraphs from your post/page or perhaps even full articles) it will take you a considerable amount of MORE effort (read: Backlinks) to achieve the same high rankings then when you would have used 100% unique written content for those categories/homepage.
I just had 10 sites drop in rankings during the latest Panda 4.0 update, I was finally showing up on the bottom of page one and the day after I ranked at page 2, 3 and 4, I started to analyze and compare those pages to pages that weren't affected by the update and guess what?
ONLY the pages that consisted primarly of read more snippets lost positions.
So what did I do? I instructed my writer to come up with new content, replaced the read more snippet structure with a static homepage and published the new fresh content and all my rankings returned, and came out even higher then before that Panda 4.0 update.
So learn from this and think twice when you have plans to rank your category pages, better just use a static page as category page or if you like the flow of new posts showing up on categories then dedicate some pages for your main keywords and rank them.
You can thank me later!
Does that mean you can just clone a site and get away with it?
Yes and No.
Yes if you have a very impressive backlink profile already.
No if you start with some brand new or weak domain, that's why those auto scraped sites and auto blogs don't work that well anymore.
Simple like that.
Can you get away with duplicate content on the same domain?
No and Yes
No when you post the same article many times, who would even do that? No one but people do it and change a few words in each article, like replacing a city name to target more locations / area's. Doesn't work.
Yes when it's caused by category, author, tag, date type of archives assuming you use canonical tags on post/page level. Your posts/pages won't rank any worse cause of that.
HOWEVER:
If you plan to rank your categories or homepage that's filled with those read more snippets, (that are in fact a copied paragraphs from your post/page or perhaps even full articles) it will take you a considerable amount of MORE effort (read: Backlinks) to achieve the same high rankings then when you would have used 100% unique written content for those categories/homepage.
I just had 10 sites drop in rankings during the latest Panda 4.0 update, I was finally showing up on the bottom of page one and the day after I ranked at page 2, 3 and 4, I started to analyze and compare those pages to pages that weren't affected by the update and guess what?
ONLY the pages that consisted primarly of read more snippets lost positions.
So what did I do? I instructed my writer to come up with new content, replaced the read more snippet structure with a static homepage and published the new fresh content and all my rankings returned, and came out even higher then before that Panda 4.0 update.
So learn from this and think twice when you have plans to rank your category pages, better just use a static page as category page or if you like the flow of new posts showing up on categories then dedicate some pages for your main keywords and rank them.
You can thank me later!