Relevant Web site content and duplicate content

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Friday, November 16th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

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As a Web writer, your task is to provide great Web content to your clients. If you’re working with small companies - and even many larger ones - it’s also your task to inform your clients and educate them about how the Web works.

This means learning about how the search engines work. The search engines’ algorithms change constantly, so that the engines can provide exactly the information a searcher wants, fast.

Over the past few weeks, my students have been asking about duplicate content.

There’s an excellent article in Bruce Clay’s latest newsletter SEO Newsletter - BACK TO BASICS: The Importance of Keyword–Rich, Relevant Content which says: “Google defines duplicate content as ‘…substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar’. Content can be seen as ‘duplicate’ when it is found at more than one Web address, or URL, and appears to be substantially similar at each location. Duplicate content diminishes the importance of the content in the search engines. The search engines want to produce the most relevant results. Web sites that are deemed to have duplicate content are typically not penalized; however, their pages will be filtered so that only one instance of the content is shown.”

When you’re aware that the search engines prefer ORIGINAL content, you can make your clients aware of this, to explain why product descriptions need to be freshened, and not merely copied across from a manufacturer’s site.

Original content is always best online. When you explain to your clients why this is so, they shouldn’t quibble too much about the cost of the content. Original content is always an investment.

New to Web writing? Read my ebook Writing For The Web. In Writing For The Web you’ve got a great guide to getting all the Web writing gigs that you want – a guide that not only tells you WHAT to write, but which also shows you exactly how to get writing jobs that PAY.