When you’re writing for search engine optimisation (SEO), originality is vital. Search engines actively look for and demote sites that are just duplicates of other content; this is something Google has particularly focused on in recent months.
A lot of website owners are aware of the need to be original when writing blogs or articles; after all, the most successful blogs are ones that establish their own ‘voices’ and become authorities on their topics. However, it’s less well understood that every part of a website needs to be seen as original in order to do well, even the aspects like product descriptions, which may seem less important and do indeed have more leeway than other pages when it comes to duplicate content.
If you’re taking product descriptions or basic information from somewhere else, you should re-write it in order to make it original. This also applies to things like industry news. You may not initially think of these things as being your website’s individual content, but the search engines need to view them in this way or you may be penalised.
Sites can run into problems with the search engines even if they have the same content published more than once on the same website. For example, if a product is listed under more than one category on your site, it’s important to re-write the product page each time so that you’re not seen to be duplicating content. Everything that’s published on your site needs to be picked up as new content by the search engines. By using the services of content writers, you can ensure that all your content is unique.
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