Is your content unique?

It needs to be because Google is putting more and more emphasis on unique content. This is particularly relevant to retail sites who stock products that are available else where. Typically what happens is the supplier sends through the product information and description and whoever stocks the product simply cuts and pastes that copy onto their own site. Leading to potentially hundreds of sites carrying exactly the same content.

When Google crawls the web as it constantly does, it will find these duplicate pages and the site will be marked down for it. So from a content marketing perspective that is not good.

Unfortunately the only way around this is to not use the manufacturers product information but to re write it in your own style so that you have unique content for that product. This is hard work, especially when you stock hundreds of products but it can be done. Add your own thoughts and opinions, reviews and ratings to make sure that you have written something unique and to be on the safe side you can use one of the many free duplicate content checkers available on the web.

Copyscape is a pretty good one. Just insert your web page URL into its search engine and Copyscape will trundle off and find out if there are duplicate of very similar pages on the web. Easy.

If your site does have very similar products with very similar content across multiple URLs you can also use canonicalization to tell Google which URL or page is your preferred one and it will not see this as duplicate content.

Unique content is a sure fire way for Google to tell if you’re trying to provide your users with good and relevant information – and you will be rewarded for your hard work, possibly more so that trying to build back links.

Content really is king.