For every hobby, profession, music artist or sport, there are a million websites. All of these sites have content on them, but only a few are popular (and it’s always the same ones that get the top spots on search engines for a specific subject). Why? One of the reasons is because these pages have unique copy that gets updated on a frequent basis.
There are a lot of factors that Google, Yahoo and Bing look at when ranking a page (such as reciprocal links, keywords in metatitles and so forth) but these algorithms are continuously changing along with the internet. A few years ago, when Search Engine Optimization started to gain popularity, you could simply retype the same keywords over and over again (such as “electrical supplies America electrical supplies America”) and you would probably get a top spot in Google for that key phrase.
Nowadays, the smart search engine folks have a number of different ways to check if your article is actually about the search phrase (by looking at secondary keywords that would most likely be on your page) and to check if you didn’t steal somebody else’s ideas.
What happens to duplicate content?
According to Google, duplicate content shows below 100 results (who’s going to click that far to read your page?!). Not only do you make your content invisible, but you will also lose Google ranking for your website.
Search engines don’t do this to punish you for no reason – their focus is on giving customers (internet users) access to the information they are looking for. If they find your article somewhere else on the internet, they figure that the user won’t want to read the same article twice so the original page ranks well and yours does poorly. Simple as that.
Keeping it fresh
Google spiders index your page when you add new content to the site. If you do this frequently, they come back to your site on a regular basis to index your pages in the search engine. If you are struggling to get around to updating your website and adding new content, find out if you can outsource the job – having unique articles on your site is important, so make sure it gets done right!