For several years I’ve heard bloggers express concern about duplicate content. I finally found two articles that explain it very well. If you are a blogger and want to guest-post on other blogs or want to use content from other sites, you really should familiarize yourself with the effects of duplicate content for Google searches:
- The SEO Benefits and Drawbacks of Creative Commons (I’ll be writing later this week about using Creative Commons licensing if you want to offer your original content as a guest-post to another blogger.)
- Is Syndicated Content Duplicate Content?
In summary, if you have an exact duplicate of text on two different pages within your blog or website, it may affect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This is not necessarily true of images on your blog. This is also the true definition of “duplicate content”… it’s within the same site.
If your site has the same text as another blog or website this might not impact your search rankings. For example, you may have an exact page elsewhere, because you moved your blog or because you’re guest-posting. (Does this make sense? You could have 100 pages from your old blog all residing on your new one. It’s okay. Read on to decide what to do.) On the other hand, you really don’t want to cut-and-paste someone else’s content in your site, of course. That’s where the search rankings suffer. Search engines don’t know which is the original post or article.
What do I do if I moved my blog?
If you’ve changed blog sites, you could choose to pay for a service to re-direct visitors to your new location (probably about $13 for a year should do it… don’t keep paying for years), or you could decide to do nothing, or you could delete the old blog. I’ve left my old blogs out there, knowing my new site is growing and getting some ranking. I wanted the content to still be found by old followers initially. (I mention the location of my new blog on the old one and will eventually delete the old blog. Maybe it’s time to do that.)
What do I do if I want to guest-post?
If you want to use your original content on someone else’s blog, I have a recommendation for you in my next post this week.
If you want to learn more about duplicate content and what you could do, I recommend you read the following topics in Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World Dr. Pete describes:
- Three kinds of duplicates
- Why duplicates matter
- Using Google Webmaster Tools to remove duplicates, etc.
- Using Bing Webmaster Tools to remove a URL
Just look for these topics in Dr. Pete’s article. The whole article is probably more detail than you need.
The photo of twins by Todd Huffman has some rights reserved.
In this series
What to Do about Duplicate Content by Sus Schmitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
eQuipping for eMinistry 
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