When designing a new website, designing a new logo for your company or writing content for your new website or blog, it is important to be ORIGINAL. You don’t want to end up with a website that looks exactly like that of your competitors (this can easily happen when purchasing templates off of existing sites) and you don’t want to get punished* for duplicating another website’s content.

Let’s focus more on being original when creating content for your website for SEO purposes.

Search engine optimisation has changed over the years and search engines are growing much more concerned with original content. Although nobody knows the exact algorithm for the major search engines, it has become very clear that original content is rewarded by increased page rank, and duplicate content is punished* – sometimes quite severely. Duplicate content is content that is identical to material found on another website.

*Punished – Yup, Google almighty and other major search engines will punish your website if you duplicate another website’s content thus lowering your search rank.

Some websites that pull RSS feeds from other websites or news services might seem to hide away from the duplicate content issue, but there is always more to a site than just RSS feeds. The more original content on a page, the more highly it is regarded by search engines. If any portion of a website contains content that is seen elsewhere, the owner can expect the subsequent penalty.