How Does Duplicate Content Affect Your Website?

As we have pointed out before, tweaking things that affect your ranking on search engine result pages is the primary way to influence traffic to your website. Your company may have a visually appealing website, but if something such as duplicate content is present, your ranking can be drastically affected. If your ranking is low, then your page drops further down the list of websites that come up when a potential customer does an internet search for a service you offer.

When a search engine like Google sends out its crawlers to look over and catalog your website content, the last thing you want to do is make your website look unoriginal or like it is full of automatically generated content. If Google perceives the content on a page as being a duplicate of another, it will punish the website. While the punishment is not some direct fine or anything to that degree, Google and other search engines basically use the information (negative and positive) that the crawlers discovered to create an algorithm that determines your website’s ranking. Negative findings such as duplicate content will lower the ranking. Google could also go as far as removing your website from its index, making it so your website does not appear at all in response to a search – obviously, this would be disastrous for a website owner.

Having original content on your website is not only important to your search engine rankings, it also has an impact on how potential customers view your business. A company with fresh, new information will more likely be viewed as an expert or innovator in that field; while someone with duplicate content appears to be less knowledgeable.

At i3, we pride ourselves on making our customer websites original and helping our clients build a reputation that any business would be proud to have.