The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: May 2006, Volume 5, Issue 5
The Evil Twin Sister: Duplicate Content
by Errin White, Seach Marketing Specialist, iProspect
Just the other day, I was on a bus heading to do a little weekend shopping. Sipping my Mocha Machiato, I glanced out the window as the bus stopped to pick up some passengers. There was a man standing on the curb who caught my eye. He immediately began smiling at me and waiving excitedly. Though I did not have the slightest idea who this person was, I gave a quick smile and then looked away.
A second later, the same man hopped on the bus and found a seat directly across from mine. “You know, we really need to stop meeting like this,” he said with a chuckle.
Now all I wanted to do was enjoy my frothy beverage in peace, so I responded, “You must have me confused with someone else.”
He was clearly confused and no longer smiling. He said, “Ashley, it’s me, Glen!”
Right then and there, it hit me. I started to laugh out loud and said, “Oh no! I’m Errin; you must have me confused with my twin sister, Ashley!”
Glen’s jaw dropped. With a look of disbelief, disappointment and embarrassment, he apologized repeatedly and then rushed off the bus at the next stop. I never saw Glen again.
Poor guy. Glen saw a familiar face and assumed that he was interacting with a friend, but he was completely fooled! Glen’s experience on the bus that day was very similar to a bad user experience when encountering duplicate content online.
Fooling the Search Engines
In search engine marketing’s ancient past, implementing duplicate content on separate domains was a means by which webmasters would try and “fool” search engines into providing multiple rankings on identical content on the same keyword phrase. Duplicate content was then, and still is viewed as a form of spam by the search engines (hence, the “evil twin”).
Duplicate content can lead to a bad user experience for a potential customer as well. If a website visitor navigates to a page and finds that it contains identical information to a page they previously visited (different domain or URL), they may be deterred from ever coming back to that site, simply based on confusion. In addition, for you, the marketer, the domain that is achieving the greatest visibility may not be the one you are hoping to rank well on. By utilizing duplicate content, you risk losing your site’s credibility from both an SEO and user perspective.
Today, search engines (particularly Google) pay close attention to duplicate content and will penalize websites by one of two ways:
Only one domain will be chosen as the authority domain, which may not be your company’s main point of focus, and rank on related keyword phrases while the other domain(s) is left out of the search engine index
All domains will be penalized and banned from the search engines index
You should keep the following key variables in mind in order to avoid penalization:
Focus SEM efforts on one domain
Take down duplicate domains and implement 301 redirects in their place in order to drive users and search engine spiders to the chosen domain
Utilize unique page content on every page, the same content should never be available on more than one URL
By keeping this in mind, you can improve the overall visibility of your website, avoid penalization from the search properties and help to stay clear of any user confusion or misconception. And maybe I will wear a t-shirt with “Errin” across the front of it the next time I jump on the bus.
