Myths And Reality Of Duplicate Content

There is so much bad information out there about duplicate content, that I want to cover the issue, what it is, why you might want to use it, how you should use it, and where and where not to use it. (There are two types of duplicate content, dupe content within a site and dupe content between sites, this article is about dupe content between sites)

Duplicate content is content that is posted originally on a site, then later posted to another site. The search engines index the content at site number one, then when they see it at site number two (theoretically) they don't index that page because it's dupe content.

The fact is, that's just not true. For example, recently I pasted a post from one of my blogs into another blog. It was true duplicate content, with the exact same title and body text. Two weeks later, the duplicate content was in position 11 on Google, but the original content was in position 13! So the dupe content site actually ranked higher!

Does that mean that you can simply pull tons of dupe content from other places and get natural traffic? Well, you'll get some, but you certainly won't create an authority site. One of the reasons site two got ranked for the dupe content is because it's already an authority site. There's tons of great, original content there now. So if you are starting from scratch, just pulling dupe content won't get it done.

And why would you want to do that anyway? The point of having a blog is to provide value to your tribe. They want to hear from you! Your personality and mojo should come through on your blog.

So what I'm recommending now (if you want to use duplicate content at all) is a 50/50 mix of original content to dupe content. Why? Because so many part time marketers just don't put up a blog post every day, but if they could simply copy good content from somewhere else (a five minute process) then they can grab content quickly and have new, high quality posts on their site.

It's important to make sure the dupe content is high quality, and adds value to your blog. Also, the original content is copy-write material, so you must leave it exactly as is. If the author has a resource box and any links, leave them in.

One thing to avoid (I learned this the hard way) is to not take your original content and post it on the social content sites. I had a bunch of my hub pages taken down because of this. They scour the internet for dupe content and un-publish hubs if they find the same content elsewhere.

The fact is, duplicate content can be an easy and effective way to add posts to your blog quickly, and help you get indexed, ranked, and more natural traffic. And while search engine optimization is as much art as science, our research has shown that dupe content won't hurt you use it correctly, and not too much.