There are quite literally millions of websites live on the internet today.  There are websites for almost anything; all types of business, music websites, hobby websites, sports websites, arts websites, news websites – just about anything you can think of!  

Every website will have some content, images, text, videos but of the millions of websites out there only a few are successful.  Why is that?    One of the things that all the successful websites have in common is that they are easy to find by virtue of having a high search engine ranking.  They will be up there on page one  and again we need to ask ourselves why they are on page one and we are not.  One of the main differentiators between a good website and a poor one is content.  Good, successful websites will consist of pages that have unique content that is updated on a regular and frequent basis.

There are many factors in the algorithms that Google, Yahoo and Bing use when ranking a page (such as reciprocal links, keywords in meta titles, page descriptions, page headers etc.) but these algorithms are continuously revised and tweaked as the internet itself continues to change. Not too many years ago, when Search Engine Optimisation started to gain popularity, you could simply re-use the same keywords over and over again throughout your website and you would probably get a top spot in Google for that keyword phrase.

Today however, things are very different; the search engines have a number of different ways to make sure that your article is actually about the search phrase you are telling them it is about.  They do this by looking at secondary keywords that would most logically be on your page.  The search engines will also check to see that your content is unique and not something that has been stolen from another website or blog!

What happens if I use the same content as someone else?

According to Google, they will not publish duplicate content in the first 100 search results i.e. the first 10 pages of results.  In practice that means that very few, if any people are going to see your content. The bad news is that not only do you make your content invisible on the duplicate content page, but you will also lose your Google ranking for your entire website!

Google and the other search engines don’t do this out of spite or to ‘punish’ you stealing someone else’s content – their sole focus is to provide their customers (internet searchers) access to the information they are looking for. If the search engines find your article somewhere else on the internet, they assume that the user won’t want to read the same article twice so the page that was published first (with the original content) will rank highly whilst your page with duplicate content will be somewhere in the ether! It is as simple as that.

Keep your Content Current and Up to Date

The search engines’ spiders will index your page each time you add new content to the site. If you do this frequently, they come back to your site on a more regular basis, so your new content will be indexed more quickly. If you are struggling to get around to updating your website and add new content, find out if you can outsource the job – having unique articles on your site is important, so make sure it is done properly!

Think of it this way; If you bought today’s newspaper and read it from cover to cover and then bought the same newspaper again tomorrow and found the content to be identical how likely would you be to buy the same newspaper again on day three?  It is the same with your website.  If your visitors see the same old content each time they visit your website how motivated will they be to return to it again?

If you would like more information about WSI IMS Content Marketing services please visit our website or leave a message below.