You just found a great article on another website that would be perfect for your site. All that’s left is to simply copy or paraphrase it and publish, right? Wrong.
This is how duplicate content is created, either purposely or by people who don’t understand that they need permission to reprint content. No matter what, Google and the other search engines view duplicate content as a major red flag.
Having any of the following kinds of duplicate content can have adverse affects on your search engine optimization effort:
- Content copied directly from another site
- Content that is repeated within your site
- Content paraphrased (which is different from content that is rewritten) from another site.
- Content that is identical to content on another site and is not properly attributed. This can include direct quotes.
In short, anything that you or someone else involved with your site writes specifically for your site is original content. Any content that already exists on another site is viewed by the search engines as duplicate content, even if you own the other website(s) that contain the content.
Duplicate content can lead to loss of site rankings, and can even result in having your domain “buried” by the search engines (placed so far down on the search results that it is impossible to find). So when in doubt, play it safe. The time that copying content may seem to save you will end up costing you more time (and probably money) in the long run.
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