THE PROBLEM with canned and duplicate content

Most search engine's indexing systems recognize duplicate content across the web and the one that had it on their site gets the credit for it

Ever see those ads for "content for your realty site"? Did you think, "terrific someone else will write the content for my website fro me. What a relief!" Sounds like a great idea, huh? Well, if you go that route, don't be surprised if you don't get indexed by Google and never drive any valuable traffic to your site. Why? It's simple. Most of those services use canned material that they slightly alter and post across multiple sites. And the web doesn't like plagiarism. Most search engine's indexing systems recognize duplicate content across the web and the one that had it on their site gets the credit for it- the rest of you copiers just get pushed to the very bottom of the indexing list as "untrustable" resources.

Having a third party provide all your content doesn't sound like such a great idea anymore does it? Now, I am not saying that all third party content providers are bad, we work with a number of companies that provides custom web content and blog articles that authenticates content through SEO and tests against plagiarism. And I know there are a number of other companies that do that as well, but as a Realtor that is investing a great deal of money into online marketing, you must be wary of those unscrupulous companies that copy content. It also means that when writing your own content, you don't copy anyone else's.

So what is acceptable when adding content to your site or blog?

1.    You can paraphrase articles from other sites, but not copy them directly. Use other articles as guidelines and inspiration. Be sure to change the content substantially when posting to your own site.
2.    You can write completely unique content
3.    You can check to see if your content is similar enough to other content on the web to be considered plagiarism by search engines by checking it with tools like CopyScape

http://www.rsspieces.com/000127

http://www.rsspieces.com/the-problem-with-canned-content

Posted on September 18, 2006 08:52:08

Comment from: Lenny Gurvich [Visitor]

· http://LennyGurvich.net

Great advice. That's exactly what I did when I got into the biz. So I ended up spending pretty big bucks on PPC (no more). I have customized most of the included content from my provider and created lots of my own content as well. It is helping in the SERPs but unless you have time, one would wisely consider professional help in SEO matters.

Permalink October 18, 2006 15:11:13