Check Your Website Ranking | Duplicate Content Will Keep You Down

If you continuously have to check your website ranking, don’t worry – you’re just like every other website owner on the planet. Most people find use all the standard on-page SEO tactics to help their website rank faster. Specific title tags and meta descriptions, strong internal linking, and keyword-specific language in a page’s content are only a few factors that will help a website rank. However, most people glaze over the most important aspect of a page that will stop it from ranking well for ANY search term – and it’s super easy to check for! We’re talking about duplicate content, and you can check for it very, very quickly.

Check Your Website Ranking Less – Test For Duplicate Content

If your pages have duplicate content on them that Google has seen already on another website, your website is toast. With the new Panda change incorporated into Google’s ranking algorithm, the search engine promotes only websites with high-quality, authoritative content. Needless to say, on-page content taken from somebody else’s website is clearly not original and innovative – therefore, Google will not rank it well!

Now I know what you’re thinking…”Slow down! I would never take content from somebody else’s website!” We understand – we’re in the same boat. However, if anybody else has ever posted content to your website who is NOT YOU, it’s essential that you check the authenticity of that content With Copyscape.

I was recently starting an SEO campaign with a new JMR client. Of course we performed a thorough keyword analysis and settled on a strong group of keywords with our client beforehand. After I did a diagnostic evaluation to check the website ranking, I was ready to make some on-page changes to get things started. However, I always check each page for duplicate content before I make any changes, as any improvements I make would be in vain if Google is already penalizing a page for duplicate content.

I found that 75% of the website’s pages had over 75% duplicated content – our client’s previous SEO has simply copied content from other websites in the same industry and dumped them onto pages instead of taking the time to produce new quality content! Do the math – over half of the website’s content was stolen from other websites!

We immediately got the team together and produced pages upon pages of fresh content. If we hadn’t made these changes, it’s clear that our client’s website would have continued to struggle ranking well. We would have been checking our website rankings all day! Now the site has a fresh start. It may not happen overnight, but Google will eventually see that we’re trying to produce great content for readers and unpenalize the site.

A website is only useful if it’s being found and converting leads, and to do this you need to be ranking well. If you’re investing in your web presence, you check your website ranking – if you’re not doing as well as you’d hoped, take the easiest step in the SEO world and check for duplicate content. Having fresh content will make a world of difference!