I had a strange request from a client recently, they have a great website that is on the up and up but this one request could have blown all of the work that had been done on their website out of the water! It’s an honest mistake that any company could make.
The company had been contacted by somebody who wanted to sell their products for them, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. Anybody selling on the internet will be contacted by people why are prepared to help them sell for a percentange. Some promotional material was required that they could show to perspective customers, again this is all fairly standard stuff. It was the next request though that could have caused real problems to my client. The agency wanted a copy of the entire website in order to post-up as part of their own site, i’m assuming that they would make some minor changes but you never know for sure. Now to anybody that doesn’t know any better this may seem like a really good idea after all 2 sites = double the chance of attracting the new customers, right? Unfortunately the world wide web doesn’t stick to this “2 posters are better than 1″ argument. Anybody involved in the SEO industry will be able to explain to you about the duplicate content penalty that is applied by Google. What this means is that you need unique content on your website, for a business this shouldn’t be that hard, after all there is only one of your business! Once you’ve got your website unique, it’s best to protect it, after all your website is likely to turn into the most cost effective marketing tool you have. When it comes to websites and achieving good search results it is often said that content is king, that should read as unique content is king, don’t forget that and you wont go far wrong!
Some key points to remember:-
- Don’t distribute complete copies of your website!
- Keep the content of your website as unique as possible
- Maintain some promotional material that other sites can use, make sure that it is different to the content on your own website
- One domain name for one website is a very good rule to stick to