Duplicate SEO Content Doesn’t Have to Be a Problem

Occasionally you will get duplicates of your content floating around on the Internet and that can be frustrating for your SEO ranking because search engines might exclude your original content from their page. If you are marketing agency in Utah churning out similar articles daily you could run into this issue frequently. Having duplicates will not help your ranking and might actually hurt it. Here are three things to do to avoid the dreaded evil twin articles.

Direct Copies

Similar looking articles that discuss the same topic will not hurt your SEO ranking. If you have a direct copy of an article you will be flagged by Google as spam. Make sure that your articles have original ideas, or if you are reworking an old article of your own try to change it somehow. For example instead of a how to article on content marketing, write a what not to do content marketing article.

Report Duplicates

If you do find another site that has copied your article you can report that copy to Google. If you are the original article you will automatically be ranked above that one, but if having another copy floating around bothers you, there are ways to remedy it. However, it could cause the occasional user to click on your embedded link and that is free marketing for your brand, maybe they are in Utah too.

How to Republish

If you have a blog post that was published on another site, but you also want to publish it on your own homesite there are ways to accomplish it and get ahead in your SEO rankings. Including an HTML tag on the post will show google that this was the original work. You have to tag the post, “canonical”, to identify that this was original source of the article. Now republish your local Utah articles fearlessly and you will watch your rankings rise. 

For more information on how to handle duplicate articles explore Kissmetrics Blog. 

Lura Briggs writes for Fusion 360, an SEO and content marketing agency. She writes for many other clients as well. Follow on Twitter.