Why Duplicate Content is Bad for Your Website
Before we discuss anything else
it is necessary to understand the term ‘duplicate content.’ It is not quite as simple as someone just copying the same page or text twice onto their website. This does happen, of course. But more troubling is ‘unintentional’ duplicate content. Duplicate content can refer to different texts that use identical keywords, use remarkably similar URLs, or even texts which feature lots of similar turns of phrase. You need to be careful to avoid ending up with duplicate content on your website. Why? Here is a guide on why duplicate content is bad for your website to explain that!
Slower crawling
The first reason why duplicate content is bad for your website is that it slows down the Indexing process. As you learn about running a website, you will find out that Google puts each site through a process called ‘Indexing.’ In simple terms, this is a quality check measure meant to screen sites that Google recommends to its users. Without going through indexing, your website will not show up in Google search results at all. And this is not a one-time thing either. It is a continuous process that monitors the quality of your website. When a website features duplicate content, the process of indexing is slowed down. This happens due to the similarities between URLs, keywords, and other indexing criteria. And, the longer the indexing takes, the longer it will take for your new webpage to be accessible through Google search!
Bad SEO
Even if you pass your indexing, there is another obstacle to people visiting your site. Namely, your duplicate content will drag down the quality of your SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is meant to help you increase the visibility of your website. This is why you should be prioritizing technical SEO fixes when working on your website! If your SEO is bad, even if your site is indexed, people will not be able to find it through most keyword combinations. Either your site will be completely off their grid, or it will be delegated to the latter pages of Google search. And everyone knows that the best you can hope for is people checking the second page of their search results!
Bad Google rankings
The final obstacle in the way of people finding your website at all, and yet another reason why duplicate content is bad for your website, is the way such content reflects on your Google rankings. Realistically speaking, Google takes no action against your site, even with atrocious amounts of duplicate content. So, seeing as they will not be directly penalized, many people ignore the issues such content causes. After all, slightly worse SEO still allows people to find your website. And even slower indexing is just a matter of waiting. What they miss, then, is how duplicate content affects their Google rankings. Google rankings are the lifeblood of a site. If you want to develop a winning blog strategy, you need to be ranked highly. Google rankings decide on the order in which hits matching your keywords are displayed!
A confusing browsing experience
Now, we are moving on to the reasons duplicate content is harmful for your website relating to its quality. And the first aspect of this is how confusing it makes it to navigate a website. As the experts from WordPress-powered websites, such as WP Full Care, point out, many visitors will close out of your site if they can’t find what they want quickly. So, by making your website a maze of similarly named pages full of nearly identical content, you are making it much more likely for them to refuse to use your site. This is, of course, bad for online shops, blogs, and business websites alike. It automatically means that your efforts to set up and run a site are going down the drain. This invalidates a large part of your investment in the website – an investment that should help your business grow.
Unappealing content
Think about it: Would you like to read the same thing repeatedly? Well, if you are not looking to improve your website content quality and rely on duplicate content for cheap view baiting, this is what your site’s visitors will be subject to. Naturally, they will quickly lose interest and eventually stop visiting your website. Now, for sites that focus on selling things or promoting their products or services, this is not too harmful. However, if it is a blog-based site, this is equivalent to losing access to your only way of continuing to make money. So, try to branch out, use different keywords, and make your content more interesting!
Plagiarism issues
The final reason why duplicate content can be harmful to your website is that your chances of getting flagged for plagiarism are high. Now, if you are trying to promote your content actively, it is only natural that you will try and share it on different platforms – be it snippets, links, or other methods. Even this has a certain degree of triggering plagiarism flags, as many YouTubers trying to run a second channel have found out. It is even more ironic to have your content flagged as plagiarism of your own website within the website itself. It will automatically hurt all of the stats discussed in the first half of this guide. And it could even flag you as a potential offender, making future reviews harsher.
One final piece of advice
Now that you know why duplicate content is bad for your website, you will likely try harder to avoid it. Now, it can be challenging to develop new and exciting topics. However, it is much better to go out of your way to hire a professional to help you with content generation than to accept using duplicate content
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