Question for the more technically-inclined among us.

Let's say that I have great content on my website - stuff I wrote myself. And I tell my friend Sue, who works in a different market, that she's welcome to borrow any of it to use on her non-competing site.

Is there any downside to me for doing that? Seems I heard that duplicate content harms your google rankings. That is - if five websites across the country have the exact same content, all five will suffer in their searchability.

Did I dream this up? Or is it something to be concerned about?

Thanks!

Hi Jennifer. Actually before I decided to get my license I did Internet marketing and to tell you the truth there are many topics regarding SEO such as duplicate content that no one really knows the answer to with 100% certainty.

With that said there tends to be things that are considered to be a consensus truth or best practice when it comes to SEO. Duplicate content is generally considered bad. No one really knows how a search engine will determine what webpage will rank better for certain content over another one. Sometimes it could be whichever page was indexed first. Sometimes it could be which one is on a stronger more trusted site.

From my personal experience and from what I've heard from other people I'd recommend either not sharing your content or have your friend use your content but re-write it in her own words so it's not seen as a duplicate by the engines.

There's one other way as well. If your friend just wants to use the content to add value for her visitors and isn't concerned about search engine rankings she could put the exact duplicate on her site and put a piece of code on that specific page to tell the search engines to not index that page thereby not creating a duplicate. If you need more info about this let me know.

There are no penalties per say, but the search engines will try to put only one copy of the content up for view. Supposedly they try to figure out which site has the original content and use that site but in reality the strongest site usually wins.

So if your friend's site ever becomes stronger than your site it is possible that their site will show up in the searches before your site does when it comes to the content involved.

The last thing the search engines want to do when someone searches for XYZ is to put up 10 different pages that all have the same content. I would either re-write the content for the other site or just have her put a link to your site where the content is housed. i.e. "check out this great article written by Jennifer Allen about XYZ". If she wants to play it off like it's her own content, then have her re-write it. While you might not mind sharing for the sake of sharing - it could potentially hurt both of you in the rankings.

That makes sense - but then how do companies that sell boilerplate web content get around that in their marketing?

As a general rule, your average agent doesn't know any better, so it doesn't even have to get addressed in their marketing.

When was the last time you saw an Advanced Access or Point2 website rank well in the search engines? The only ones that do have significantly customized the content. Everything else is just boilerplate white noise that the search engines filter out.

My point2 site ranks fairly well, but like man from the band says the ones that do are customized. Of which mine is sort of. Plus I did blog for awhile with links pointing to it. But now I'm on to better things with a different site. That's another reason why you never see any agent pages such as the ones the larger real estate companies provide free for the agents ever even rank. As they are all the same except the name has changed. I would have her rewrite at least 25% of the content you will loan her. If not for search engine results, but to add her own personality and make it feel real. I myself dislike websites of agents or any businesses that don't let you know who they themselves are.

Here's the code I was talking about earlier. She would just need to insert this line of code into her head section of the programming for that particular webpage to prevent search engines from indexing the page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Cool! So, if I have a page on my website that I don't want indexed - I'd just insert that code on that page?

Yup. There's other ways of doing it as well. You can list a number of pages or whole sections and subdirectories that you do not want the search engines to index with one single file. It's a bit more advanced stuff though. If you have a webmaster that does most of the work for your site they should be able to do it without any problem.

If you want to read more about it on Wikipedia check it out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard

Seo engines use an ever changing formula that is proprietary to them.

Basically you have have very similar content rank on the 1st pages of Google for certain keyword search terms.

Like if you went for foreclosure you would never achieve anywhere close to a first 5 page ranking for you link or website.

If however you target say cherokee ga foreclosures in your website,blogs etc. then you could get ranked really high fast and also you would pick up specific leads for your area.

So basically what I am saying is they take away your city your town and replace it with their own along with a few other things and the search engines will see it as enough of materially different to rank it.

I have seen this done over and over in different market with getting on page 1 for Yahoo,Msn,and Google.