Blogs Are Duplicate Content Magnets

When you here the subject "duplicate content penalty", most people think about duplicate content across different websites. That's actually not that big of a problem compared to duplicate content in the same website. Search engines like Google hate automated generated websites and blogs. If you put up a website with 1500 products, overnight, and the content differents only on 100 word decriptions, you aren't going to see hardly any traffic.

Blog platforms output your content in the same template over and over and over. What's worse! If you write short blog posts, under 200-300 words, your pages will look almost exactly the same as every other page. This has led a lot of bloggers to believe that longer blog posts are more search engine friendly. Its not necessarily the length of the post, as it is the uniqueness of the page and the content. All the code, html, photos etc... count towards duplicate content. If you are using a platform like wordpress or any other standard platform, write at least 3 unique paragraphs in each blog post. This will help your pages differ by more than 50%. If your pages are 50% similar or higher on average, its going to really hurt your rankings. You can use a tool at http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php to test your pages.

Also consider, if you are using any third party javascript plugin like a comment system from Disqus, the search engines can't read javascript. So all of those unique contributing comments will not count towards your unique content points. There are creative ways you can make your pages even more unique. For instance, on the blog platform I have developed, I allow placement of random content generators. And you can post the first 50 characters of your latest blog posts to the home page. That will allow you to keep your homepage focused on your target keywords while providing unique content changes.

Written By Drew Sire

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Blogs Are Duplicate Content Magnets

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