What is duplicate content? Is it bad for your website?

We all know that content is king. We put so much effort into creating relevant content in the hope of getting good rank and traffic on website. Do we always create our own “original” content? No guys, I’m sure there are many people who at least once might have copied content from other sites and post it on their own, right! Why do we do so? Just to get a good rank on-site? Or Increase the pages of contents? Or to get more traffic?

Anyway! Whatever purpose you’re stealing (of course) content from another site is actually a “duplicate content” which you post on your own site. Have you ever thought having duplicate content on site is good or bad? No, then this blog is for you. Read this blog till the end and aware of duplicate content.

Let me start with the basics first.

What exactly duplicate content is?

Duplicate contents are basically similar content which appears at the multiple locations (URLs) on the web, and hence search engine isn’t able to recognize which content to show on the first page of the search engine. This ultimately hurts the rank of the site and then the problem arises for website operator as more than one URLs show the same content.

Let’s read Google’s definition of duplicate content, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

There are two types of duplicate contents you will see

First – internal duplicate content: this type of content is created when one domain creates duplicate content through multiple internal URLs on the same website.

Second – external duplicate content: also known as cross-domain duplications. This type of duplicate content occurs when more than two different domain has the same page copy indexed by the search engines.

Having duplicate content on site is bad or not?

Folks, first let me tell you that Google doesn’t impose a penalty on you if you have duplicate content on your site. So it’s good to have duplicate content on a site, right? No guys, if you think Google can’t penalize your site for having duplicate content then you should also know that it can’t identify whether to rank your page on the top search result or not. In this way, duplicate content can confuse Google.

Nevertheless, duplicate contents are not always bad if it’s used in a call to action or in short description, but yes, for large pieces of content, it is really bad and also harms the rank of your site. So don’t do this if you want your site to rank on the top of the search engine result page.

Let me also tell you what users will think about if they find duplicate content on your site. Having duplicate content on your site will make users think that you haven’t put the effort into creating your own original content. This makes them feel that your content isn’t unique or doesn’t have the quality. And chances are they won’t purchase your products or services.

So I would recommend you to not to do this if you want to get a good rank of your site on Google and increase your lead generations.

The bottom line!

Let me conclude this article by saying that you no need to employ duplicate articles in your sites. Though Google doesn’t penalize you for that yet you won’t be able to get a good rank of your site and also visitors will see your site as unauthentic and then they might not visit your site again.

So try to be original in your content and put some efforts to create a relevant, informative, and authentic content for your visitors. Of course, you can take some idea from other content and then modify in your own words.

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