Myths and reality of duplicate content

There is so much bad information out there about duplicate content, that I want to cover the problem, what it is, why you might want to use it, how you should use it, and where and where not to use it. (There are two types of duplicate content, duplicate content within a site and duplicate content between sites, this article is about duplicate content between sites)

Duplicate content is content that was originally posted on one site and then posted on another site. Search engines index the content on site number one, then when they see it on site number two (theoretically) they won’t index that page because it’s misleading content.

The fact is that this is not true. For example, I recently pasted a post from one of my blogs onto another blog. It was true duplicate content, with the exact same title and body of text. Two weeks later, the duplicate content was at position 11 on Google, but the original content was at position 13! So the misleading content site actually ranked higher!

Does that mean you can just pull tons of fake content from other places and get natural traffic? Well, you’ll get a few, but you certainly won’t build an authority site. One of the reasons site two was ranked for fake content is because it is already an authority site. There is now tons of great and original content. So if you’re starting from scratch, simply extracting duplicate content won’t do it.

And why would you want to do that anyway? The goal of having a blog is to provide value to your tribe. They want to hear from you! Your personality and mojo should appear on your blog.

So what I’m recommending now (if you want to use duplicate content) is a 50/50 mix of original content to duplicate content. Because? Because a lot of part-time marketers just don’t put out a blog post every day, but if they could just copy some good content from somewhere else (a five minute process), then they could get content out quickly and have fresh, up-to-date posts. high quality on your site.

It is important to ensure that the duplicate content is of high quality and adds value to your blog. Also, the original content is copy and writing material, so you should leave it exactly as it is. If the author has a resource box and links, leave them.

One thing to avoid (I learned this the hard way) is not to take your original content and post it on social content sites. I had a bunch of my hub pages removed because of this. They scour the internet for misleading content and unpublish hubs if they find the same content elsewhere.

The fact is, duplicate content can be an easy and effective way to add posts to your blog quickly and help you get more natural, ranked, and indexed traffic. And while search engine optimization is as much an art as it is a science, our research has shown that duplicate content won’t hurt you if you use it correctly, and not too much.