The Problem With Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is an issue that has plagued the Domaining world for a long time now. As Domainers try to develop their names as quickly as possible they oftentimes look for ways to get content onto their sites in a scalable fashion. Fresh content costs money and when trying to build hundreds or even thousands of domains the costs oftentimes become too high to be feasible for most domain owners.

The problem here is simple – as direct navigation declines domain owners are trying to find ways to retain their traffic – search traffic is the only way to capture that same targeted traffic without paying for it! However, without fresh content, Domainers run the risk of having their pages demoted by Google for having duplicate content.

At the last two conferences I attended this is a topic that came-up a lot in conversation. I would tell people that my company develops our domains to achieve strong search engine placement which drives our traffic. The first question always was – where do you get the content? My answer is – from a real person who writes the content herself! I know everyone is looking for a scalable solution but it is important to remember that Google is trying to give proper credit to sites written-by real people not developed by automated solutions.

Now I’m not saying there are no automated solutions out there – in fact at DOMAINfest I had the chance to see the SmartName platform as well as Traffic Media – both which claim to index well in search engines. I will be setting-up 50 domains with each of these services and will report-back my findings to my readers. That being said, having a site with Fresh content should always rank higher and SEOMoz has a great article discussing this topic and explaining what is really going-on inside Google’s head (or at least an approximation of it).You should take the time to read this article as it will continue to be an important issue in the Domaining world.

SEOMoz Article – Duplicate Content

As always I welcome my readers to share their thoughts and comment!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton