Glossary Pages & Duplicate Content

As of late the issue of Duplicate Content has been well publicized. A few months back I wrote an article detailing the new problem;  Duplicate Content - A Recent Reason for Dropping Rankings.

The Issue

Things have not changed, in fact, duplicate content is a bigger issue now than ever as the rest of the search engines are following Google's lead in filtering out text that is found on other websites.

March 2008 a patent filed October 4, 2007 by Google became public. This document comments that duplicate content can even come from differing technologies. For instance, text of an HTML webpage is compared against the text of PDFs, blogs, news articles, etc. Ouch. Google has always been on the leading edge for detecting duplicate content.

This is why we encourage our clients to send us new content; unique content that is written personally. SEO requires good content, regular updates and new pages added to a website in order to improve or even maintain search engine positioning.

The Fix 

Coming up with new content can be troublesome though. There are only so many ways to describe a service or procedure. Sitting down and rewriting a website from scratch often leads to procrastination.

However, there might be a little help for many of our clients, especially those in the dental industry; Glossary Pages. At Roadside Multimedia we include a subsection of pages to provide a description of the terms used within the website. For some this might prove useful in providing us with new content. Instead of coming up with new articles from scratch, the glossary pages could be altered in your own hand and then provided to us once rewritten.

This of course is easier said than done. The issue remains though. For those that provide us with regular new content for their website we see a difference in search engine positioning over those that do not. Please consider this idea.