Two words: Duplicate content. Duplicate content is a term Google uses to describe text that is duplicated on either many pages of your website or on many other websites around the Web. Google’s goal as a search engine is to return the very best, most relevant results it can.
Returning great results, as opposed to a list of websites that all say the same thing, keeps people coming back. If the text on your website is the same that’s on many other websites, chances are Google will not rank you well.
Matt Cutts, employee No. 8 at Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and engineer in charge of the Web spam team, said it best: “Why does your website deserve to rank when all the other thousand websites have the exact same content”
Google changes its ranking algorithm every day and a large percentage of those updates are aimed at filtering out websites that have duplicate content. The largest of these updates was called Panda (yes, Google sometimes names its updates and probably just another way to torment SEO people) and it negatively impacted millions of websites.
The good news is if you lost your ranks with the Panda update, it is not hard to get them back, just replace all the copied text with unique text and you should regain your positions within a few months.
It’s a difficult conversation that I have pretty much every week with new and prospective clients. Finding out all the pages of your website need to be rewritten can be a daunting task. Make it a point to recreate your text so that it is uniquely yours and it will pay dividends in the long run.
