Duplicate website content causes negative SEO
- Duplicate website content located at more than one URL is a search engine optimization faux pas that can go unnoticed to many optimizers and website owners because it does not cause any immediate and dramatic errors in the short-term.
- Search engines depend on precise, and relevant results to please their customers, keep them coming back and consequently gain the reputation of a dependable resource that can be depended upon. It is therefor in their utmost interest to make sure that they do not index, and much less, they do not present duplicate or content that is otherwise not unique and valuable.
- Duplicate content is not unique or valuable to search engine users. Website owners and content creators know that one needs to have more and more and still more content on a website in order to be indexed for the required terms and keywords. Much like people previously duplicated keywords across multiple pages on their websites in a bid to create emphasis by deceiving the search engine index, some have thought that a shortcut to creating a website with extensive, detailed and valuable content for users is to deceive the indexing robot. It being evident that human surfers and very unlikely to confuse duplicate content for unique and rich content, and being that search engines are putting less weight on the content of META keywords and descriptions while focusing more on the page content, some Search engine optimizers are tempted to exploit the idea that much like in the case of stuffing META tags and other HTML mark-up elements intended for semantic tagging by using the same, or similar content in different pages. Some even use software applications that re-arrange words and page content (at the expense of legibility) in a bid to prevent indexing technologies from identifying similar trends in their content and declaring it duplicated and invaluable. Besides the intentional posting of duplicate content with the intent of creating the impression of a content-rich website, some content management systems (Web CMS) that present differently formatted content for different uses (screen view, print, email, audio etc) can unintentionally present duplicate content to search engines.
