If you have been a website manager for some time now you know that search engines are filtering out content that seems to be copied from other sources. Everyone needs content on their sites to rank higher, but if your site seems to be borrowing most of the content from other sites on the web then it won’t come as a surprise to you if your site hardly ever shows up in any search results. This is because of content filtering that all search engines use.
To avoid showing duplicate content results, search engines have content filters that remove copied content from their results. The obvious penalty is lower rankings. The unfortunate thing about their filters is that they are not perfect and tend to penalize legitimate sites as well. So how do website managers protect themselves from these content filters?
Be careful when using ideas from other people. There’s nothing wrong with using ideas as long as you don’t copy it word for word. Write it in your own words and make it reference your site and what it is all about. Be careful of scraped pages. If you are using software to scrape content from other sites then you are going to get penalized for it. Most content scrapers tend to take content and re-write it in a very unreadable state. Poor spelling and grammar are an easy tell that the content is duplicated.
Web Mangers for e-commerce sites need to be very careful not to cut and paste content for products on their site. Most of these types of sites publish the manufacturer’s exact description word for word causing the content filters to devalue the page.
Use your own description for the products to stay ahead of the billions of other e-commerce sites.
WEB MANAGERS BEWARE OF DUPLICATE CONTENT
Be careful of topics that have been over written. A similar topic written over a thousand times in a different way sparks a problem. Many search engines have a filter that catches this. Use tools like Plagiarism Checker to ensure that the content you are publishing is not similar to other peoples content.
If you do use content from other sites, just simply make it your own by focusing the relevance to your own site. Add your own opinions and make sure to reference the other sites content. This is a great way to create your own ideas and content avoiding the content filtering penalties.
Website managers need to understand that to keep the internet honest so to speak search engines need to have this content filter in place. Otherwise no content would be original and everything would be copied and regurgitated. Knowledge would stop growing and information would get old and out dated. So keep your content fresh and up to date and watch search engines reward you with lots of visitors.
For more information on how we can help you with creating original content for your websites contact us here.