Roll up, roll up! Webmasters around the world, duplicate content is hurting your website really bad – and you don’t even know why. For reasons why duplicate content is hurting your website, don’t take your eyes off this page until you reach the bottom!

Here are 5 Reasons Why Duplicate Content is Hurting Your Website

1. It’s Bad for SEO

Search engines like to see websites that are frequently updated with fresh, unique content. They reward such websites with high search engine rankings for related keywords – that’s basically how SEO works. If you’re trying to rank your website for keywords but you’ve got the same content copied and pasted across each page, you’ll find it very hard to rank.

If your site features content that is duplicated on other websites on the internet, you’ll also find it very hard to rank. In a nutshell search engines get confused when they see duplicate content – they don’t know which result to rank first. More often than not they’ll opt to rank the result on the domain with the highest authority or PageRank – neglecting the other results to the depths of the search engine rankings where no one ever visits. Even worse, you might struggle to get your content indexed in search engines at all if it’s duplicated many times.

2. Readers Have Seen It All Before

If you’re searching for information about your favorite band and every single website says the same thing, you’ll soon get bored. Each website you visit ought to have unique content in order to keep you interested. Imagine every single newspaper published the same story using exactly the same words. There would be no point in having more than one newspaper in circulation. To keep readers interested your content needs to be different from what they may have read elsewhere. It’s not rocket science!

3. There’s No Variety

There’s a saying that “variety is the spice of life”. That’s very true in the world of websites. There are millions of websites out there – each one needs to be a little different from the next otherwise what’s the point in having a site? Imagine every website online looked the same and featured the same content. What a boring place the internet would be.

4. Other Websites Are Better than Yours

What’s the best website on the internet? We don’t know. No matter how much money you spend on design, no matter how much money you spend on content, there will always be a better website than yours (most probably). Don’t let that defeat you though – because you should always strive to make your website as good as it can possibly be. Which website is better: Yours which is full of duplicate content, or your competitors, whose is full of handwritten, unique content? We’ll leave that one with you.

5. Ultimately, Your Traffic Will Decrease

A combination of all of the points above means one thing: A decrease in traffic. Of course, if your website has featured duplicate content from day one, there’s a chance you don’t realize that the grass is far greener on the other side (the other side being a world where every website contains totally unique content on every page). If you just can’t seem to increase your website’s traffic, or it has started to drop off recently, perhaps it’s time for you to address potential duplicate content issues. We’ll give you a quick tip: Lots of WordPress websites suffer from duplicate content without the knowledge of the owner – here’s why. Simply install a plugin like All In One SEO and you can “noindex” the archive pages that cause duplicate content issues on your WordPress website.

So there you have it! Duplicate content is hurting your website in lots of different ways, you just didn’t realize it! If you’ve got no duplicate content on your website then you can breathe a huge sigh of relief.

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