April 14

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What is Duplicate Content & Why You Have to Avoid It

By Jason Khoo

April 14, 2020


Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupas SEO Talk and Tea. 

Today's conversation is going to be about what duplicate content is and why you shouldn't be doing it. But before we jump in, it is SEO Talk and Tea and I have to introduce the tea that we're having today. It's Genmaicha. I hope I'm saying that right. I've never had this before. I know it's very popular, but I just don't know why I've never really had it. But yeah, someone from my house who actually bought a big 10-ounce box and they're like, "Please help me drink some." This drink today is actually the first time I will be brewing it. So you're going to see by the end of the video a live taste test of this tea. Never had it, don't know much about it, but it said steamed green tea from Japan with roasted and popped rice. That sounds great. That sounds like the other brown rice tea that I have. I'm going to go set this down. It's windy today,

All right, so let's jump on into talking about duplicate content. The reason why duplicate content is so important is that a lot of companies when they're trying to build a website, so they're trying to build out their content library, it's easy to just try and, "We have white papers from our vendors," or sometimes they'll just copy and paste it. There are lots of times when companies want to kind of take a shortcut and they'll just copy and paste content from somewhere else. It can be as innocent as you think it is, or as shady as you think it is. I've seen the whole spectrum. I've seen very innocent companies who just were taking their vendor's, supplier's, white papers and copying pasting on their website because that makes sense. Or I've seen people who do it really shady. They don't want to make content so they kind of just copy and paste from different places and put it on their site.

All in all duplicate content is not good. Google has made an algorithm update and I don't remember the name of it, but I'll put it in the show notes that will penalize you if you have duplicate content. What that means is that if they catch too much duplicate content on your site, they will penalize you, drop your site from rankings and you won't be found. So what's important for you guys is that when you're doing content, it's okay to write your own content, of course. It's okay to sometimes take inspiration and base your content on other sites that you'd like to read, or that you think a similar website does a great job, but make sure you're not copying and pasting at a wide-scale level, because if you do so you can be penalized.

The important thing to do is when you're writing content, make sure you're not copying pasting, have someone else write it or have yourself rewrite it. Or second, what you can do is if you have to, or you really want to copy and paste content for organic reasons. Let's say it's like you're reselling a product or service that another vendor or manufacturer makes, you can put that on your site and add what's called a canonical link. Canonical link will tell Google, "Hey, by the way, this content on our site is not ours. It's actually somebody else's and we're fully aware of that and we want to give them full credit." That will help you escape by the duplicate content. But keep in mind if you have duplicate content, you will be penalized.

So when it comes to strategizing for your company, ensure that you're making original content. The best way I like to explain it is, remember when you were in high school or college and you'd write a paper. You had to write a paper about something that the textbook already talks about. You're kind of not copying the textbook, but you're just changing how you would structure the sentence. So saying like, you know, "The brown fox jumped over the fence," you can say, "The fence was jumped over by the brown fox." It's as simple as that.

So when it comes to making content, try not to duplicate the content. You can be penalized. It's okay to have a couple or a small amount of content that was duplicated, but ensure that you're not doing it on a wide-scale level. You can be penalized and it will hurt your site. If you're penalized it takes a long time for you to get back. So hopefully you guys will take that warning and make sure that you aren't really duplicating too much content. Hopefully you guys, that was valuable for you guys. I'm going to go ahead and pour this tea. If you guys liked what you saw today, please like and subscribe, and I would love to see you guys again on other videos. Thanks. That's good. Yeah, it tastes like the other brown rice. That's good.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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