Richard VetsteinCanned Content May Violate Google Duplicate Content Policy
The vast majority of agents who have recently set up a blog with pre-packaged, canned content don’t realize this can be the Google Ranking Kiss of Death for their sites. Let me give you an example of what occurred today in the blogosphere to several unsuspecting agents.
Today, at exactly the same time, my Facebook news feed lit up with several real estate agent blogs pushing out the same post about “Fall Lawn Care Tips.” Curious, I clicked on several of the blogs and quickly realized that the post was exactly the same across all the blogs — canned, pre-packaged content.
Then I Googled the first sentence of the post and Yikes! Fifteen other blogs had the exact same content posted at the exact same time. (Plus I noticed that the sites’ title — the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization — was not done correctly, as several sites had the default WordPress tag, “Just another WordPress site.” Amateur stuff.
I betcha the agents who paid for these blogs have never heard of the Google duplicate content penalty. I’ll quote directly from the Google Webmaster Blog:
However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.
Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information… In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
Uh oh. This is why using canned content is not good. Not only does your blog look and read the same as your competitor –which is bad enough — but the practice of distributing identical content across an entire blog network can quickly kill your site’s Google rank and cause Google to remove the site entirely from its rankings.
For this reason, we at HubConnected have always advised our agents to create their own unique content. The Google issue aside, canned content is exactly that. Canned. Readers and potential clients want to see your real personality, not some unemployed college English major’s.
If your blog provider is using canned content, tell them to can it, and start focusing on your own unique content.
