What is the importance of original content and why does the occurrence of duplicate content hurt?

Effective SEO for a website consists of many technical and content-typical elements. For many years, Google has insisted that pages in the top positions in the search results meet strict quality requirements and carry informational value for users visiting them.

Why is the originality of content so important in SEO?

Google explicitly says that content originality is a ranking factor, which means it’s crucial to a site’s SEO. When Google’s robot visits sites, it verifies them from various angles, one of which is precisely whether the content it finds was created for them or simply duplicated from other places on the web.

Thus, the logical conclusion is that domains without original content have no chance to rank high in search results, which will result in a lack of meaningful organic traffic. In this day and age, when a huge amount of business has moved online, this means the inability to be competitive with other companies’ offerings, which is a straightforward path to financial loss and a lack of growth opportunities.

That’s why it’s worth reviewing the content as early as the planning stage of building a website so that it has a chance to be indexed with valuable content right from the start. In addition, it is also worth remembering that we should develop and supplement the content on the site in order to appear in search results for more keywords.

The Google algorithm responsible for verifying the originality of pages – Panda

Web site owners may wonder how Google verifies the originality of content on a page. The answer, of course, is the Panda algorithm, one of Google’s longest-standing algorithms, which has undergone many changes over the years.

What is Panda basically responsible for? Unlike the animal whose name it bears, this algorithm is not at all a clumsy sloth. With the help of the Panda algorithm, unimaginable amounts of content are verified for originality on a daily basis.

The algorithm itself was introduced in 2011 and has been continuously improved since then. With the technology at Google’s disposal, we can only imagine how technically advanced it could be in 2023. Therefore, with confidence bordering on certainty, we can say that copied content in the results’ top positions will not pass.

What kind of content does the Panda algorithm “dislike”?

What the Panda algorithm dislikes about content on websites is, first of all, of course, the lack of original content, but this is not the only factor; here is what else it considers negative:

• creating content that completely ignores the user’s needs, making it poorly or not at all responsive
• spam – that is, worthless content created merely to fool the algorithm, very often without much linguistic sense
• very short content, for example, content that answers a potential user question with a single sentence and does not develop the topic in any way
• keyword over-saturation – that is, excessive inclusion of phrases that we want to position, which negatively affects the quality of the content presented

What is the importance of content originality in the context of EEAT principles?

The EEAT Principles (an acronym derived from the English words experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, meaning experience, knowledge, credibility, and trust) is a set of rules designed to help content creators judge the quality of the content they create and publish online.

Originality of content matters for basically every component of EEAT. If you want to create content based on your broad experience in a given topic (E-experience), then write it yourself rather than making a partial or complete copy of something that already exists on the Internet.

Originality of content is important.

The same will be true when we want to share our own knowledge (e.g., expertise). In order to adequately convey what we want to say to our site’s users, we will use our own words and not sign our name to something created by someone else.

If we want to share what we have to say, we will use our own words and not sign our name to something created by someone else.

On the other hand, when we talk about credibility (A – authoritativeness) and trustworthiness (T – trustworthiness), creating original content should be the only right choice, if only because nowadays it is very easy and fast, even for a person without access to SEO tools, to check if a text is really authored by the one who published it or signed under it.

That being said, EEAT-compliant content must not be duplicated in any way with content already appearing on other websites.

What is duplicate content and what are its types?

Duplicate content is an English term for copies of content already present on the web. It is used in the SEO industry to indicate problems with a website’s originality. This phenomenon can generally take two forms: internal and external duplicate content.

What is external duplicate content?

External duplicate content is content copied from one or more sites that have published the content in question before. Internal duplicate content does not necessarily mean that the entire site’s content has been copied from elsewhere; it may only apply to individual sections, entries, or product descriptions.

Internal duplicate content does not necessarily mean that the site’s entire content has been copied from elsewhere.

What is internal duplicate content?

Internal duplicate content is the occurrence of a particular piece of content on the site more than once, which, for example, leads to duplicate content on subpages. Internal duplicate content is no less problematic than external duplicate content and can lead to problems with a site’s positioning.

What dangers to a site arise from the phenomenon of duplicate content?

Duplicate content can have two dangers, one directly related to a site’s visibility and positioning and the other to legal implications.

In the case of consequences from Google, we may face the search engine robot not indexing our subpages with duplicate content or imposing a penalty on our site for low-quality content and not displaying it at all for user queries. Dealing with this problem is relatively easy – it will be necessary to invest in quality content that is valuable to users and request re-indexing of sub-pages through Google Search Console.

Of course, the legal implications are more problematic. Content created for the Web is also subject to copyright law. So, the author of copied content can pursue legal action, which we know is time-consuming and expensive, and we can say with a high degree of certainty that he will end up winning.

As we can see above, duplicating content already present on the Internet simply makes no sense, has no logical justification, and can be associated with many unpleasant consequences. It’s worth creating your own original content and adding it regularly to your site, which will certainly translate into increased organic visibility.

What is the most common cause of duplicate content in online stores?

Large online stores offer hundreds or even thousands of constantly changing products. In many cases, the owner of such an online store is not also the manufacturer of the products it sells.

The owner of such an online store is also the manufacturer of the products it sells.

Such online stores usually make exactly the same mistake, which may be due to ignorance, lack of capacity or simply ignorance – they publish products on the site with exactly the description attached to them by their manufacturer. This results in every online store selling a particular manufacturer’s product line having exactly the same content on the site without any changes. Very often, even with exactly the same language or punctuation errors.

This can, of course, result in problems with the indexation of the products or, even if they are indexed, their low or zero visibility for keywords in Google searches. However, it all depends on how much of a given sub-page realistically constitutes such a copied product description; it is assumed that original content is that which contains a minimum of 80% text that is not found anywhere on the Internet. So if such a description is added in the midst of a long dedicated content, then it may go unnoticed.

When running an online store, it is always a good idea to create your own product descriptions based on those provided by the manufacturer or at least partially modify them.

Why do many product manufacturers have a big problem with the phenomenon of duplicate content?

Of course, 1:1 copying of product descriptions by online stores can also have a big impact on the websites of the manufacturers themselves. In theory, if the manufacturer published products with descriptions on the web first, he, as the author of the original content, should not have a problem in such a case, although it also happens differently with this (the algorithm works automatically, so mistakes happen to it).

But what about the case when, for example, a manufacturer who sold his products through intermediaries for many years decides to open his own online store? Unfortunately, the only right answer in this case is that in order to position himself well, the descriptions of all products must be created from scratch.

And what if the manufacturer decides to open his own online store?

How to protect ourselves from unlawful use of the content contained on our site?

Basically, there is no effective method to protect ourselves from others copying our published content. We can, of course, block the possibility of copying content from our site and post information that the site’s content is protected by copyright, but there will be those who will try to circumvent these solutions. However, Google’s algorithms are getting more and more effective and sophisticated, so they will be able to determine with increasing accuracy who was the original author of a given piece of content and penalize sites that have copied it.

How to check if duplicate content is present on our site?

The easiest way is to copy content from our site and type it into the Google search box. The search engine will then show us all the sites where there is a fragment of the same text.

In addition, we have several commercial tools at our disposal to facilitate such verification, such as CopyScape, Plagiarisma, Prepostseo, or Siteliner.

The search engine will then show us where the same text appears.

Summary

Originality of content is of paramount importance in SEO, especially given the emphasis search engine algorithms now place on content quality. Duplicating existing content is not worth it, as this is a short-term solution that may cause us more problems than benefits in the future.

Original content is not worth duplicating.

It is worth focusing on creating valuable content that is useful to the user based on your own knowledge and experience. However, if we do not have the time to do this, or simply writing is not our forte, it is better to use professional copywriting support.

If we do not have the time to do this, or simply writing is not our forte, it is better to use professional copywriting support.

Do you need support in creating original content? Check out what we can offer you at Up&More – OUR COMPETENCES