Now, more than ever, duplicate content has become an issue in terms of organic search engine rankings. With the popularity of wiki or hub pages and social media profiles, many people are relying on the copy and paste method of content creation. While you may think this is a quick way to spread the word about your or your business (say, by taking a section from your About page on your website and pasting it somewhere else), what you’re actually doing is generating duplicate content, which is a big Google no-no.
While it’s well-known that duplicate content can negatively affect your rankings, due to filters search engines have implemented to do away with spam, it’s not very clear what constitutes as duplicate content. There’s no real way to know how much is OK to be copied. E-commerce sites, for example, will often have a lot of the same information in product descriptions as other websites, and there’s not really a way around that. The best advice is to avoid taking too much–large sections of text or entire pages–and recreating them. If you’re wondering if you could come off as spammy, it’s best to do a little revision.
One of the most common duplicate content issues arises when people rename a page of their website and forget to redirect the old URL to the new page. If you just leave the old page up and the new page has much of the same content, that counts as duplicate content and could raise a red flag in search engines. Even if you change the content, it’s a best practice to redirect to the new page or site, anyway.
Unsure if your site could contain duplicate content? Try this free tool from Copyscape.