Remember the age-old, proverbial line - “old wine in a new bottle”? Well, here’s a line which aptly describes the true nature of duplicate content featured by a significant number of websites today. Whether or not duplicate content is frowned upon or favored by top search engines is still a matter of much debate and inconclusive, conjecture. However, it’s quite possible that with cutting edge algorithms in place, the only ones who have the ability to discriminate between “unique” content and “duplicate’ content are none other than the search engines themselves.

So, what’s the verdict? Do search engines really care about unique content? Here’s some food for thought.

Duplicate content decelerates web traffic

Indeed it does. But first, what’s duplicate content? As the very term signifies, it can be defined as the repetition of content in a significant number of areas throughout a website and dished out to viewers repeatedly. However, before you learn how top search engines react to duplicate content, put yourself in the shoes of people who visit your site. If you were they, wouldn’t repetitive, duplicate content viewing be a turnoff? Wouldn’t your first visit, or maybe the second, be the last? Well, that’s precisely how visitors in general react to duplicate content.

Duplicate content turns search engines off

Now, here’s how leading search engines like Google react to duplicate content. Most search engines will not, in general, decline to feature your website in its entirety. However, you could expect them to intentionally overlook a significant part of it, specifically those areas that feature duplicate content.

This is why, it is crucially important to avoid content duplication from other websites. After all, if you carry an identical webpage as that of another website, you’ll be in direct competition with it. In this case, remind yourself of the proverb - “the best man wins”. What’s more, the truth is that top search engines like Google are only able to assign top ranking to one website at a time for a specific webpage. So, you’ll do your site a world of good by shunning duplicate content however compelling your reasons, or the attractiveness of such duplicate content, may be.

Unique content is a web traffic accelerator

Indeed it is. However, you’d need to take a few steps to ensure your site generates maximum web traffic with unique content. For a start, review your web content as frequently as you can. Measure its quality and relevance against the content featured in other competing websites which are targeting a similar audience as your own. In doing so, you’ll be in a position to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the content in those websites and, in turn, improve your own content accordingly.

To find favor with leading search engines, gain top search ranking and ultimately generate optimum web traffic to your site, nothing short of unique content will get you there. If you do not have personal or in-house content writing skills, you could easily hire a professional, web content writing service to do the job. Such entities possess expert copywriting and SEO skills that will give more clout to your web content, make it unique, dramatically improve its relevance and help it gain stand-alone visibility in the online crowd. Unique content will not only be welcomed by top search engines, it will generate maximum traffic to your site, too.

So, do top search engines really care about unique content? Don’t think twice ... they DO! And if a part or more of your site has duplicate rather than unique content ... it’s time you did something about it.