In this week’s episode, I share a simple method that you can use to check if your site has duplicate content. Far too often, website providers and marketing agencies re-use website content, and since Google rewards unique content with better visibility, duplicate content isn’t good for your site. Watch and learn how you can check your content yourself to see if it’s unique.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing a quick tip that will help you check to see if you’ve got duplicate content on your site.
So today, we’re talking about duplicate content on your site.
Most people think that Google penalizes duplicate content, but that’s not true. Hey, it’s my not really evil twin again. Dude, stop that. I’m serious. Dude.
Yeah, I get it – but come on, it’s kinda annoying.
So anyway, Google rewards unique content. If you’ve got duplicate content, it doesn’t really do anything for you.
It’s important to have unique, relevant content so you’ll stand out in search results and so customers know you’ve got what they need. All too often, business owners will copy content from other sites, or marketing partners will reuse content from other clients. In some verticals, businesses will get their websites from a small set of website vendors, and those vendors will typically roll out a site with boilerplate content.
I was chatting with some car dealers after a webinar recently, and I showed them a quick and easy way to see if they had duplicate content on their sites. A few of the dealers told me that I should share the tip on my next video, so here I am, sharing the tip.
You’ll want to use content from your home page or a major product or service page. It’s a good idea to try it a few times, with a few different pages. You’ll start by finding a sentence or longer sentence fragment that doesn’t include your business name or city. That bit is super important – if someone copied content over to your site, they’ll obviously update your business name and city, so if those are included in what you copy, then this little trick won’t work.
So you’ve found your sentence that doesn’t include your name or city. Copy it, then head over to Google. Paste the sentence into a Google search, but add double quotes. If the phrase is included in double quotes, it forces Google to only return results of sites that use that exact same sentence.
Ideally, you should only see your site as a search result. If you see any other sites, that means those sites have the same content as your site, and that’s bad.
It’s especially bad in situations like this, where you see that hundreds of other sites have the same content that’s on your site.
Again, you’ll want to use your home page, your about us page, or a main product or service page for this test. And now, you know a quick and easy way to check if you’ve got duplicate content on your site.
That’s all the time we’ve got left for this week’s video, so you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here:
We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
