Duplicate Content

How duplicate content disadvantages online retailers

Search engines are battling to keep your results free of low quality content, and of course, duplicate content. Although it may seem a quick and easy way to fill the pages of your web shop, the search engines are watching with a vision to eliminate this practice from the results.

The trouble with duplicate content is that it gives rise to the issue of how to give preference in a results page to 1 of 2 identical pages (for example). Original authors can justifiably feel unimpressed by a competitor making use of their content to generate traffic for themselves. At its most extreme the duplication of another’s work could be considered copyright theft, although this is more a plagiarism issue than likely to be relevant to the ecommerce and marketing community.

Duplicate content issues in eCommerce

The most typical instances of duplicate content in the context of an eCommerce or online marketing environment are likely to be seen in product descriptions. Often, manufacturers provide descriptions for resellers of their products to use. The only trouble is that if web shop operators all make use of the same product description, this again creates duplicate content issues. They are not the original authors, so how should they be ranked?

Search engines use robots to crawl the pages they index, and can easily identify instances of content they have seen before. The robots can look at dates of publishing as a method of determining which is the original (or unique) content, and which are the copies. The same robots also examine the link structure within and around the page, along with trust in the domain, and use various techniques to identify if an article has been scraped or spun from an original.

Search engines are consistently improving their abilities in detecting instances of duplicate content, and intentionally reducing the preference they give to domains. This helps to increase the visibility of sites that implement quality unique content into their marketing strategy. From the perspective of a search engine, unique content indicates a genuine contribution to the Internet and is considered a compliment to existing search results.

As far as they’re concerned, you’re working in their interests. In return, they are happy to work in your interests.

How to escape issues arising from duplicate content

The most simple, most permanent and fastest way to free yourself from issues surrounding duplicate content on your site is a straightforward one. We know and can accept that the original author of a piece of content should rightly take the full credit for their work, precedence in search engine rankings. A more technical term for this is to implement a unique content strategy on your web shop.

We recommend you allocate a third of your marketing budget towards replacing your duplicate content with purpose-written unique texts. Over time, the benefits of replacing duplicate content will simultaneously be complimented by the benefits of having unique texts. Before long, the content of your site will be unique, bringing you higher volumes of quality traffic, and of course you won’t have to worry about any duplicate content issues or penalties.

Replacing the duplicate content on your site with quality unique content is a sure fire way to improve the visibility of your site, the levels of quality traffic reaching your products, and ultimately, your revenues. The net is always closing in and the search engines are getting more effective at identifying duplicate content that has been altered in some way, disguised, or otherwise.

Search engines consider duplicate content a pollutant of their results, which in turn makes them look less competent in returning the best result in the eyes of Internet users. With each algorithm update, sites depending on traffic from search engines are losing much of their visibility due to the presence of duplicate content on their domain.

It’s more important now than ever to display quality and unique content, so get in touch with the experts at Textprovider to establish how quickly we can replace your duplicate content and help you win the favour of search engines.