You’re often told that duplicate content is detrimental to your SEO efforts, with some (new) search engine optimisers erroneously believing that a “duplicate content penalty” will wreak havoc on your web rankings. However, what if I were to tell you that you may be able to use duplicate content to your advantage?

Before I go on, I’d like to take a moment to define duplicate content and syndicated content, as the differences between the two are important.

• Duplicate content is defined on Moz as, “content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL)”.
• Syndicated content is defined on Search Engine Watch as, “the process of pushing your blog, site, or video content out into third-party sites, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail”.

Now you see, while I was searching for a few reference articles to help a member out on an SEO forum using the key phrase “subdomains vs subdirectories pros and cons“, I came across something peculiar in the search engine results pages (SERPs) that I didn’t quite notice at first. Can you spot it out?

In case you didn’t notice, there are 2 websites on the same page for that keyword that have the exact same content. For reference, take a look at the article on Site-Ninja:

Now take a look at the article on Ameravant:

Initially, I assumed that one of the sites just copy and pasted the article (and that may be true as I didn’t look into it much), although now I’m under the impression that the author syndicated the content to a site that’s owned by the same person. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll go with the syndicated content assumption. Either way, what’s important here is not why the same content is on both sites, but the search engine result page (SERP) and how this can potentially benefit owners of multiple sites in the same niche.

3 Ways Duplicate Content SEO Can Be Advantageous

1. There’s A Chance Users Will Visit The Second Website

In this scenario where we ignore bounce rate due to low-quality content, a web searcher will find one result, go back to the search results, and click the other website. If you have a website with ads on it, this can provide you with the chance to increase ad revenue, assuming the users don’t back out of the site upon the realisation that they just read the same article.

2. You Can Link Back To Your Original Website

This is a technique associated with syndicated content. If you were to visit the sites in the example at the beginning of this article, you’ll notice both of them have a lot of interaction despite being the same article on different websites. I suppose someone with 2 SEO sites (or 2 different SEO site owners) with different audiences can take advantage of this and link back to the other website.

3.  There’s A Greater Chance Of User’s Visiting One Of Your Websites

Of course, ranking 2 sites for the same keyword is a double-edged sword. On one hand, there’s a chance, albeit a small one, that you’ll receive more organic impressions and clicks from users in Google since users your results are taking up more of the results realestate (e.g., think of this like a bigger advertisement). On the other hand, you’re your own competitor, which means the syndicated article (or the original in some cases) may not rank very well in the SERPs. However, this most likely won’t be as detrimental as keyword cannibalisation (which will usually cause one page to rank well and the other page to rank very poorly).

Conclusion

Keep in mind that while all of this is based on what I observed in the SERPs, the “benefits” I discussed in this article are still mostly theoretical as I haven’t tested it myself. So until I get a chance to test all of this for myself, don’t assume that you’ll dominate the first page of the SERPs with 10 different websites with syndicated content.