It has been three years since Google first introduced their Panda filter; this is designed to filter out pages and whole websites if too great a proportion of its content is duplicate. At first glance this seems like a great benefit clearing up the internet of plagiarism but this filter is tougher and stricter than you might think.
Google introduced this filter in response to an increase in the amount of low quality content that was circulating around the internet back in 2010, it uses a number of metrics to evaluate content, these being:-
Its concept of uniqueness doesn't mean who created the text or when, but a range of factors, which mostly means in practice that the strongest site or most authoritative is seen as the source, so Wikipedia, facebook, ebay etc - even if they are the not the first.
It is easy to fall foul of this filter unintentionally, let's say you have an ecommerce store an ebay store, a facebook account and a blog. Naturally you will want to list at least some of your products on the ebay store and refer to them on facebook and your blog. We have found that by innocently copying your own product descriptions you can create a Panda problem for your own site.
Your site appears to Google as if its copying its content from ebay or Facebook, where in fact it's the other way around and its all your own content anyway. But the filter gets applied to your own site.
So the answer is to always use unique content, on your own site, on ebay, facebook everywhere. It's so much extra work to keep doing this but it's the only safe way to keep clean and away from the dreaded Panda filter
This again seems to be the easiest and most natural thing to do, and in some cases such as with motor dealerships you are required to do so. But again sadly this leads to the same sort of potential problems. You need to think constantly about keeping your site copy completely unique.
A great tool is copyscape this automates the process, but if you have a lot of content to check then there is a small price.
We check all our clients content for uniqueness which saves a huge amount of hassle, this is part of our monthly Search Marketing offering. If you want to learn more then contact our main sales number for further information.
It all comes down to hard work and high quality, if you avoid any short cut you can expect to be rewarded if you take short cuts you can now expect to suffer. The same rules apply to everyone so take comfort that you are not alone!
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