The Duplicate Content You Didn’t Realize You’re Producing

One of the biggest traffic sources of all time today is the search engines. A lot of people spend countless hours optimizing their websites for search engines, hoping to get at least a page 1 listing.

Perhaps you have too… but no matter what you do, you website doesn’t seem to rank.

You’ve optimized the headline. You have the right keyword density. You’ve got inbound links and so on but nothing seems to be working.

Maybe this is the problem: Duplicate content.

But I always write my own unique content! Quiet down and listen to me. You might be producing duplicate content and you don’t even know it.

This is something I learned from the awesome Stompernet course that I bought a few years back. In fact, I still go through them from time to time and I never fail to learn something new.

You’ve got to be insane if you haven’t taken them up on their no-brainer deal.

Let me clarify a few things first before I dive deep into the world of duplicate content.

I don’t believe duplicate content in different domains will hurt you. They might not have as much search engine juice, but certainly will not hurt your rankings.

Duplicate content on the same domain, however, can get you into trouble. If you’ve got the same content appearing on different pages, you can be pretty sure they will not appear in search engine results.

Here’s the problem: I’d bet most of you uses a template for your website. You’ve got the header, the sidebar(s) and the footer that appears throughout the site.

Humans can certainly distinguish a template from the main content. In fact, there is an innate ability in us to quickly detect changes in what we see for survival as a species. So when you click to another page on a website, your eyes are quickly drawn to the main because the header, sidebar(s) and footer are all the same.

Not so for the search engines.

For one, they can’t even distinguish template from main content.

In other words, your template becomes duplicate content. The search engines crawls your site, found that they are all duplicates and so only one got indexed and the rest goes into “supplemental”. I can almost hear…. AHHHHHHHHH! Relax.

Here’s what you do. The main thing you’ve got to do is to tell the search engines that this page is unique enough for a ranking in its own right. To do that, you’ve got to have more words in your main content than in your template.

1. Highlight all the words in that page and paste in a word processor.
2. Delete your main content.
3. Use word count to find out how many words you’ve got.
4. That’s the magic number you’ve got to aim for whenever you write your content.

Here’s a little tip: Search engines can’t read words in images. To cut down on the number of words in your template, use images instead of text.

If you would like to learn more invaluable copywriting and blogging tips, QuickFix Copywriting has plenty. So if you don’t miss future posts that might make a difference to your business, don’t forget to subscribe by clicking on the image below!

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Tagged as: duplicate content, seo copywriting, serach engine optimization, stompernet