Staging Diva Recommends Avoiding Duplicate Web Content

TORONTO, ON, August 09, 2012 (Press-News.org) It is common for home stagers to use blogs to market their businesses, but not everyone considers the ramifications of posting duplicate content across multiple websites. In an article on the Home Staging Business Report blog, home staging expert Debra Gould provides advice for optimizing web content while maintaining search engine rankings.

"We all want to spend less time writing new articles online to support our home staging business, but we also need to be careful about being penalized by Google for duplicate content" Gould writes. "No one truly knows all the factors that go into a search engine algorithm, which determines the relative ranking of different search results, but there is general agreement that duplicate content is a big no no."

Gould's advice is to avoid putting the same content on multiple pages because search engines will not index all of them or consider them all equally important.

"Most SEO experts agree that being the first location where the content appears is the most important," Gould says. "Search engines will index the original source and then ignore (or give less ranking to) the rest. It's also possible that a larger/more important site will rank higher than your smaller/less important one with the same content. Then you might actually lose that 'published here first' advantage."

Gould explains that Active Rain and Blogspot are large sites where home stagers may be tempted to post their duplicate content. Since thousands of members generate their content these sites rank really high and may steal ranking from their smaller contributors.

"Since Active Rain and Blogspot are such huge, well-ranked sites, I don't write a post on my blog, Home Staging Business Report, and then copy it on those sites," says Gould. "I post the article first on my blog, and then write a variation for other sites, by writing a new headline and first paragraph. Then I re-phrase the rest. After listening to dozens of people discuss this topic, the consensus seems to be that this is the best approach, and overall, the content should be at least 30% different to avoid the duplicate content penalty."

On the other hand, Gould points out that content written for an email newsletter can be duplicated on a blog as a time-saving measure since search engines will not index the original email content.

For additional home staging business and marketing tips, Gould invites home stagers to visit the Home Staging Business Report on the Staging Diva website.

Contact

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva
Voice of Possibility Group Inc.
416-691-6615
debragould@stagingdiva.com
http://www.stagingdiva.com

About Staging Diva

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars' worth of real estate, including 7 of her own homes. She is the president of Voice of Possibility Group Inc., which operates a home staging division, SixElements.com, in addition to StagingDiva.com, which has trained over 7,000 home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.

Debra has gained international recognition through features in major media in the US and Canada including: This Old House, HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, Global TV, City TV, The Wall Street Journal, Women's Day, Reader's Digest and more.