Did you know that just like a frozen ready meal, your website text could be full of nasty surprises? Unlike “beef” burgers however, the hidden surprise is not horse meat, but duplicate content.
Your website text may look the part, but is it really just horse meat inside?
The hidden dangers of duplicate website text
Up until recently, the internet was pretty forgiving about content being duplicated across websites. That was until the legendary Google algorithm update codenamed “Panda”. One of Panda’s many intended goals was to identify website text that was duplicated across sites and downgrade their search engine rankings.
Overnight previously successful websites found that they were not appearing in the top Google search results any more. All because their website text could also be found on other websites. And lower search engine rankings meant less website visitors, eventually leading to less leads and less sales.
How did this happen?
Some unscrupulous websites were simply stealing content from their competitors. After all, why write your own website text when someone else has already done the hard work? For these sites, the Panda update was a timely lesson in honesty.
100% unique website text is like 100% beef – tasty!
Other websites, particularly those operated by smaller businesses, were not directly responsible for the Panda-smackdown. For an SME, creating website content is time consuming, so they outsource the task to a professional copywriting agency instead. Many of the cheaper agencies simply recycled content among their clients, to reduce their own workload and maximise their margins. And until Panda, there really wasn’t much of an issue.
The Panda update caught many site owners by surprise. They figured that because they were paying someone else to oversee operations, everything was fine. And by spending quite a lot out for website content management every month, they believed that more money would buy them a better service.
What to do?
The only way to avoid being penalised by Panda is to ensure that web content is unique and of good quality. This may mean rewriting significant sections of text to replace duplicated content. Or just committing to writing great webpages and blog posts in future.
And if you choose to outsource, ensure that your partner only ever uses completely unique content for your projects. As most experienced SEO copywriters are now familiar with Google Panda and its effects, this should be a given, but you must check before committing to an ongoing writing partnership.
Here at Tech Write, every copywriting project I undertake is (and always has been) 100% unique, with content created and shaped specifically to each client’s needs. Drop me a line to see some examples of my previous work or to find out how I can create fillet steak-standard website text and stop your site being condemned as horse meat.
