Google to Webmasters: Reduce Similar Content Pages

For years, webmasters, content writers and search marketers have been unanimous in their attempts to write unique content. It’s a very important part of good website management, but according to some reports there’s not really much that can be done to help prevent a warning from Google.

Even if you write something totally unique, it can still be flagged as overly similar. This has become a bit of a problem for writers who can only say things on so many ways, but find themselves limited by the saturation of the market. There’s a rather interesting anecdote floating around, courtesy of the Google Webmaster Forums.

One webmaster was less than pleased at how his website was kicked down the rankings. It made his site lose ranking position, and he went to the forums to complain. Aaseesh from the Google team responded to his query telling him three things:

1. To improve the quality of the content on-site in general.
2. To cut down on the similar content found on numerous pages.
3. To reduce the similarity to the content found on other domains.

The issue is that, while this might seem like generic advice, there was enough proof that the webmaster was on the wrong side of the content strategy here. A quick Google search based on the info above provided some very similar pages across the website.

Most of them ran with more or less identical titles, with very similar content from page-to-page. While most of the pages were for a different city or region, they all had remarkably similar writing which would get you penalized.

If you are a webmaster and you find that your content is being penalized, you may want to look to see if you have had the same problem. If you do, then our main recommendation would be to start changing content on each page – we know it can be tough to write about the same topic in a unique manner, but it’s better than just using more or less identical content from page-to-page!

Try your best to make it more varied, cut down or reduce similar content and you may find it easier to avoid falling out of the Google guidelines for higher SEO ranking.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable