Welcome back, this is john Locke, and today I'm talking about a serious subject--which is
copying content from other websites, and putting it on your website. Now,
how does this happen? What are the consequences of it? [copying content]. Let's talk about it. Now,
the reason why I'm bringing this up is, I've seen a couple cases recently, where I was called in to
do SEO for somebody's website. But when I went to check out the content--it just didn't feel
right. It didn't sound right. And sure enough, I just highlighted the text, and did a search
in Google, and it turns out 95% of the content on the site was copied from other people's websites.
Not a good look. Copying content--it's the lazy person's way of doing stuff. Now,
I understand too--I've been in situations too, where you ask clients for content, and not
everybody finds it easy to write or express their thoughts, or express their expertise in words,
or they're stuck for what to say. But they know what they want to tell the world. They just don't
know how to say it. They want to tell people about their services, but maybe sometimes they just
don't have the exact way of saying it. I've run into cases too, where when asking clients for some
sort of content for the site, I go in and search it--like that, just highlight it and search it,
and guess what it was copied from somewhere else, too. So, this is something that can happen in a
lot of circumstances. What are the consequences of copying content? Now, people talk about the
duplicate content penalty and duplicate content. What usually happens is your site isn't going to
get an algorithmic penalty, or a manual penalty, or anything like that. But it's not going to rank
as high as it could, as if it was original content. You're not going to get a manual
penalty or anything like that, definitely no. But there are a lot of sites out there
that do the same thing. Like I was talking about before, with the site where I was checking it out,
I was doing SEO for it. What I've found is a lot of sites in this particular category--a lot of
sites did the exact same thing. They were not the only ones that did this! Copying the content and
putting it on their site. Some of these actually rank okay. I guess, maybe there's just not super
high levels of competition. There is a lot of [SEO] competition [in these categories] but maybe
not super hard or difficult, or unreasonable amounts of competition. The copying content is
just a bad way to go, though. It's not something that you should really do, because people see it,
they look down on it. And oh, it's going to get you a lot of rejection from your peers, and from
the other people in your industry if they see that you copied their content. They're not
going to like that. They are going to think less of you, and they might not be willing to help you.
I know in most industries, any type of industry, most industries are small, and all the people know
each other--that all the players know each other, even if you're in other states, or anything like
that, or other countries or whatever. Most of the people know who you are, so not something
that you should really do. It isn't going to necessarily affect your rankings. I don't think
necessarily it's going to hurt your rankings, but it's definitely not going to help. The best thing
that you can do to actually help your rankings is to express your thoughts and in an original
manner. If you have the exact same content that four or five others websites have, there is no
reason for Google to say, "We should elevate this webpage above these others", because they all say
the same thing. They all have the same content. There's no real reason or no differentiation
between them. We've already analyzed it, so we can pick the one, possibly, that has been
around the longest. Or maybe the one that has the most links. But we're not going to elevate any of
them just based on the content, because it's all the same. That's the biggest detriment to copying
other people's content. You should find a way to express things in your own words, or work with
someone that understands your particular industry, that is good with words. A good copywriter--that
might be the way to go. The last thing that I want to say with this--content is the most important
factor when it comes to ranking. Yes, there are other things that are important--the backlinks
coming in to your site are very important. The way that your brand is represented through reviews,
and how other people mention you on their sites is very important. Ad of course, the design of
your site has to be good. You can't have a subpar website that ranks, unless there is absolutely no
competition--and all the websites in your category are kind of ugly and difficult for people to use.
Not user friendly...The best thing to do [for SEO] is invest in all those things. But definitely the
most important thing is content. Google analyzes the words on the page. They analyze the sentence
structure--and you can go back and watch our video on the Natural Language API to see a little bit of
how they do that. They've come a long way in the last 20 years. Most search engines
have [come far] and they can analyze the context of the language, and of course, if they've seen
other examples of the content before--the exact same phrases--that's not going to be a positive
mark for you. It's not going to be a positive thing, where they say, "Yes, we should definitely
push this page, because it's saying the exact same thing that five other websites said."--No.