We’ve been asked about duplicate content a few times in the past month. It looks like some senior living providers are working with a newer content mill to churn out blog posts.
While that’s usually not a great idea from a quality perspective, there’s another issue that made us cringe even more…
It looks like said content mill is telling folks it’s “fine” to post the same blog article on each individual community’s blog. It will still boost SEO.
One provider had 3 communities and each had their own blog. For another it was 7 communities all posting the same thing.
Each relayed that they were told it’s a myth that Google penalizes you for duplicating content.
In reality, they don’t exactly penalize you. But your content won’t help your SEO either.
It’s a distinction without a difference, and why we decided to tackle the issue in an Ask the Expert style post.
Duplicate Content Doesn’t Help Senior Living Rank
Dating all the way back to the Panda update in February of 2011, Google made it known that the days of creating content and setting it on repeat to use on multiple sites were over.
They were and still are looking for original content of better quality instead.
Since that time, there have been loads more Google algorithm changes. Each of these are intended to help deliver searchers the content and answers they are seeking.
Companies who invest in quality content that searchers find useful will be rewarded with higher rank.
So back to the repetitive blog post issue…
Let’s use the senior living provider with 3 different locations and 3 different community sites.
The provider had literally been posting the same blog articles over and over and over for months. Every blog post created for them was loaded to each of their 3 blogs.
And, not surprisingly, they were frustrated that the blog they were investing heavily in wasn’t yielding any results.
(To clarify, they set up a blog to help boost their SEO. Improved customer experience was important to them, but a lower priority.)
What happens when Google sees all three of the posts with word-for-word identical copy?
Google refers to this type of content as “appreciably similar.”
When the search engine sees the same content in multiple places, they divide authority. And that dilutes the post’s SEO value and your rank.
The bottom line is that if your top priority in creating a blog is to improve your visibility, duplicating content isn’t really “fine” at all.
Drop Us a Line
Trying to create original content can be a time-intensive endeavor. If you need help, drop us a note! While we sometimes have a waiting list for our blog services, we work hard to manage it.