What if a blogger takes his own content on a particular page and recreates that content on another page on his site? Would that increase rankings since there would be two listings for that content on that site? Or what if that very same blogger takes the same content again and re-purposes it for another site? What would that effect be?
Surely, we can’t be the first to pose those questions. In fact, duplicating content is a common practice that bloggers, and more traditionally webmasters as a whole, use to attempt to increase page ranking. Whether it’s a simple copy and paste job or a quick reshuffling of the content, it’s really the same stuff.
The good news is that search engines have cracked down on this. Not only will having duplicate content not help you, but it may also hurt you. Imagine spending all that extra time finding new ways to produce the same content elsewhere just to get penalized for it. Duplicating content is simply a trick that no longer works and to be candid, was never that honest to begin with. The bad news is that you may find that duplicate content is painted with a broad brush, so even if it’s reproduced with the best and appropriate intentions, it may be harmful for your page rankings.
For instance, you are a volunteer at a local fire company and you wrote an article on how often to replace batteries on smoke detectors on the website. You learn that people have found it valuable since often times dead batteries are found in smoke detectors which would buy the valuable extra few minutes, or even seconds, to get the residents to safety. A neighboring fire department asks they could post your article on their site and you believe getting the message out is a priceless so you agree. Voila! Duplicate content is born! In other words, people who try to deceive search engines penalize those who don’t.
So in this case, what could you do? You could (1) give the article a good massaging to give it a different feel, (2) do nothing and not care about SEO for these sites, or (3) have someone in the other fire department understand your message and have him write his own article.
After all, it’s OK to have a similar message. Let’s face it, how many fresh, ground-breaking articles are there? The difference is that you have to add your thoughts, your writing style, and your spin on a not-so-new topic. There’s just something to be said about having original content. And search engines have said it: WRITE ORIGINAL CONTENT!