Are You Worried About Duplicate Content for Your Dealership Website? You Should Be.
If you’re hoping to rank well for your website, you need to know the dangers that exist to prevent you from reaching that goal. One of the worst culprits and most common is duplicate content. In fact, some experts estimate that almost 30 percent of the content on the internet is duplicated. To stand out from the crowd, you need original content that grabs Google’s attention and that of your audience.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is a serious problem for website owners who want to rank well with Google in searches and rankings. It’s important to understand what it is so you can identify it and take care of the problem.
The definition of duplicate content is content that shows up on more than one page online. The most common reference is content that has been copied or plagiarized, but it most often happens unintentionally in several ways. If you have an e-commerce site and use the manufacturer’s description for the items you sell, your content will match what other sellers have for the same items.
Another way duplicate content happens is when you create multiple URLs for the same site, such as WWW. pages and non-WWW pages or Http and https. If the content is the same for both sites, it’s listed as duplicated even though you own both sites. If you have a print version of a page, it’s also a copy. These are prime examples of how duplicate content can be created.
Consequences of Duplicate Content
So, you’ve discovered you have duplicate content on your website. What’s the big deal? How will it impact the site? Content that has been copied can cause serious consequences.
When Google detects multiple pages with the same content, it must decide which one to prioritize. Only one can be the authority, and it must choose which one appears to be the best. Another issue with ranking is the importance of linking. With multiple pages saying the same thing, links on the topic may be spread out instead of all going to one page. This causes the pages to cancel each other out instead of improving rank.
If too many pages on a site are duplicated, it will reduce the authority of the entire site. In fact, in rare cases, Google can even ban the domain from its index. At the very least, it won’t index the duplicated pages so they won’t rank in searches at all.
Example of Duplicate Content on Dealer Websites
The following excerpt is from a dealer’s “about us” page. It’s a decent paragraph.
However, when you search in Google for that exact sentence, you see that there are a total of seven dealership websites with the exact same words on them:
What is Digital 1’s Solution?
Now that you understand what duplicate content is and how it can impact SEO and website ranking, your next concern is probably how you can fix it. Digital 1 can help you with this issue. First, we’ll identify all content that is duplicated from your dealer’s website. We will remove it so that the pages aren’t penalized and replace it with new content.
Before we add new content to your site, we will evaluate your competitor’s site and the strengths and weaknesses of their keywords to know what to target. We will create original content that is focused on location and utilizes the keyword weaknesses of your competition. You can rest assured that our content follows Google’s guidelines. Instead of focusing on search engines and trying to rank through a formula, content is written for people. This means it has value to readers and will organically contain the information necessary to rank well.
We continue to promote this new, original content by driving high-quality backlinks to the site. As Google indexes the pages, they will rank higher and be seen as the authority.
If you are worried about duplicate content or not ranking well and want to implement these SEO strategies to create fresh, authoritative content that Google likes, contact Digital 1.