SEO Hack: Duplicate Content Strategy
– Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel for another Q and A Thursday video. I'm here with Adam from Viewership. – Hello everyone. – And this week's question is… – This is from Cal, and he said " Hey, Neil. Great video as always. I have one doubt. When you use the same article from a blog on LinkedIn article or something else, does Google see it as suspicious, like a duplicate content?" – Well, thank you for
asking that question Cal. Here's the thing with duplicate content, and we're gonna explain how
duplicate content works, not just for Google, but
social media as well. And we'll give you a
few different scenarios. So first off, if Adam here
creates content on his website about Youtube marketing on viewership.com, and I take his content and
I put it on my website, and I link to it, but let's say I take his
whole content verbatim, and, heck, let's even go as far as saying I'm not gonna even link to you, Google will know because
he published it first. And they're not gonna penalize me, but his content's gonna
rank higher than me.
Now if I take snippets of his content, and I have a blog post
about Youtube videos, which I do, and I reference Adam in quite
a few of my Youtube articles, and I linked him, and I'm taking paragraphs from his blog and I link back to him, Youtube doesn't mind. They'll still rank my
article and his article. They don't care so much
about duplicate content, they more so care about
the user experience. So if you're just jacking
someone's content, and you're just taking it word for word, and you're not providing any other value, you're not gonna get penalized, you just won't rank that
high for that article. They'll look at each and
every single individual page. Some will rank really high, some won't. But the one's that you
just take the content, they won't do that well.
So don't waste your time
taking other peoples' content, or scraping it. But if you wanna integrate
their points into your blog post and link out to him, cause there's no point in regurgitating the
same information, right, don't reinvent the wheel, link out to other people who
already done the research, have the stats, provides more
credibility for you as well, you can do that; there's no issues there. Now with social media, some of you guys wanna
do duplicate content where you take your
content from your website and paste it all on LinkedIn. A strategy that David invented for us, and this strategy worked really well and we're still doing this today, I used to take my blog content and put it all on LinkedIn verbatim, and that used to create engagement and it did really well and it created a ton of engagement.
But what we found is we weren't
getting tons of conversions cause people from LinkedIn
weren't going back to the site, and they weren't converting, so with David, we started
running experiments internally, he would take the first three or four… How many paragraphs did you take, David? Yeah, so he took
– Ah. the introduction. As he mentioned, the introduction sells
the rest of the article, and he always took the introduction and he put at the end of it: click to continue reading, and it drove traffic back to the website. Not only, yes, it's duplicate content, Google didn't care.
We still ranked well on Google, but we are generating
traffic from LinkedIn, and more importantly, we're
generating conversions, right? Traffic without sales doesn't matter. Now if you're releasing
content on social media: videos, audio clips, and you're just putting
them on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, whatever it may be, put them everywhere. It doesn't matter if the text is the same, the videos are the same. Even though there's
overlapping in audiences, you'll find that you'll get
more viewership in general by just putting the
same content everywhere. And we do that. We put our Youtube
videos on Youtube, right, when you compress them,
and you set them up, and you optimize them for us.
We do Youtube, we do
Facebook, and we do LinkedIn. And funny enough,
Youtube does really well, Facebook's does really well, but we've been getting more views, than anywhere else right now, on LinkedIn. Cause LinkedIn, even though we have less
followers on LinkedIn, they lack video content, so they're pushing it harder
than any other channel, and they're doing free marketing for us. So make sure you're pushing
out your content everywhere. Social media doesn't matter on duplicate. Now if you wanna take that
same video and audio content that you put on social media
sites on your own website, like neilpatel.com, yes, you'll get engagement, but you probably won't
get as much engagement as you will from the social sites, and you'll find that the video content that you put out on your own website and the audio content that
you put on your own website, even if you add in the
transcriptions on your own site, it won't get much Google love.
So you can do it for engagement, but don't do it for Google love. And what I do is I put
those videos and audio files on my website, but I block them from Google indexing because I know that they're not gonna rank
that content anyways. So that way, it doesn't dilute my site and make it weaker. So that way, my content
pages rank higher, stronger, and my overall authority
throughout my whole site isn't getting spread to pages that I know Google won't rank well. – Just I'd be curious on
your opinion of what we do, so I create videos for both my companies, put it on Youtube, and then we have a writer
take the main points of that and extrapolate it, and make
a totally different article and a longer article for SEO.
Curious, would that make sense to do? – That works really well. I don't know if you're doing this, but I would do that plus
take the video format and embed it into the articles. – Yeah, that's what we're doing. – Yeah, and that works really well, – Right – and use a different
headline for the title than what you're doing for the video.
– That's exactly it. Yeah, so they're taking, at least, my content, my ideas, and
then just turning it into, like, a 4,500 word article.
– Yeah, that works out great. Cause then you can add in
the key words that flows, even if you don't have the video plus adding it, you're accomplishing, you know, the visual and audio aspect, as well, as people who
just want to read the text. – Sounds like it's all
about user experience. – That's right.
It's just like, if it's good for the user,
it's good for Google, you know? – Yes, but they'd rather not rank videos on your website, they'd
rather rank Youtube, which is a property that they own. By adding your videos to your website, your time on site increases,
your user metrics go up, and you'll find that your overall Google
rankings will increase, but the key is not to just
have videos on your site, it's text, as Adam was mentioning, and embed the videos, so that that way people
watch videos on your website plus read the text, the
time on site increases, user metrics go up, which overall increases your
rankings for your whole site.
So thank you guys for watching. If you like it, make sure you subscribe, share the video. If you have a question for next week, leave a comment below, we may answer it. – Reading every single one of them. – Yes, we may answer it in
another Q and A Thursday video or worse case, we'll at
least, or I'll at least respond to your comment
and answer the question..
