It is quite widely known and accepted in the search engine marketing world that duplicate content can have severe consequences in the search engines, but what does that mean?

Many people including a number of top search engine optimisation companies will tell you whatever you do, do not ever duplicate content. Well we strongly disagree, that statement is far too broad and not explained.

What’s Bad – If you go to someone’s website and copy a chunk of content and then paste it on your website and claim it as your own, you are breaking copyright laws. As such the search engines may penalise your website by applying a soft filter to lower your results or remove you from the listings entirely.

However, what if you want to quote a website? Copy that quote and on your website make sure you are making clear that text is a quote, use speech marks and more importantly after the text reference the website and author and maybe link to the website you copied the text from.

Do not be afraid of duplicating content within your own website, I once had one of the UKs top SEOs informing me how duplicating content on your own site is disastrous, however after I pointed out that on their own site the blog is duplicated about six times they realised they where mistaken. I can also back up this claim another way, take online shops for example usually you can get to the same content on numerous different physical / dynamic pages; do you see Google penalising the vast majority of online shops for duplicating their content?

The key thing to remember with website copy when it comes to search engine optimisation is make sure all your copy is well written and legible and more importantly written for the purpose of providing information to the websites end users (not the search engines).