I was recently asked to review a site that was ranking poorly and not indexed well in search engines, especially Google. The site looked well designed, had nice internal linking, and a fair amount of SEO performed on it. A quick search on Google and Yahoo uncovered the problem - duplicate content!
Duplicate content plays tricks in search engines, and that's nothing but bad for you SEO efforts. For example:
- The popularity of any one page that's duplicated is diluted, reducing the likelihood that it comes up in search results
- Some of all of the URLs may not appear friendly to a visitor, thereby reducing the likelihood of that visitor clicking on it
Upon finding duplicate content, Google will remove content it finds duplicated and only show one link that appers to be the "best". Larger sites will often have dynamically generated pages with little change in content, URL, title, or keywords. This is an immediate RED FLAG and will cause Google to remove the offending pages. Any SEO done for the tossed pages has also beed tossed out the window.
If you think your site may have duplicated content, our SEO services can help you. Contact us for more information.