Grumpy SEO Guy
Everyone is Lying to You About Duplicate Content, and Even More SEO Job Interview Questions - Episode 74
This is Grumpy SEO Guy, Episode 74. When is duplicate content actually a concern and Part 2 of the SEO Job Interview Questions from the previous episode, number 73? You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm Grumpy today. I'm Grumpy today because everybody seems to not understand duplicate content, and they tell you stuff that's not true. So, we're going to kind of cover two things today. First, we're going to talk about duplicate content, okay? And whether or not it's something you should actually be concerned about, and then we're going to talk about Part 2 of the job interview questions that I got in the previous episode. So, the previous episode was about going on SEO job interviews and the questions that they asked me, and I found another email with questions that they asked me. So, I'm going to read them to you at the end of this episode. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. Alright, so what is duplicate content? Duplicate content is when you take content and you reuse it, okay? That's literally all it means. So, if somebody has a post and you copy that post and put it on your website, that's duplicate content. Duplicate content means any content that is the same as some other content. That's pretty straightforward, I think. Now, duplicate content can appear on different websites or it can appear on your website. So, for example, if you have two articles on your site that are the same, that would be duplicate content. There are two cases when duplicate content is a concern, okay? And I'm going to explain what they are. I've already talked about them in episode two. I'm pretty sure it was episode two. Anyways, episode two is the penalty episode. You should go listen to that episode if you want to learn about penalties. But I also talk about one case where we had a client accidentally give themselves a duplicate content penalty, but I'm going to talk more about that in a minute. So, and then at the end, I'm going to give you an example proving that duplicate content is not a thing. Okay, so I guess we will just begin right now. Okay, there are two cases when duplicate content is a problem. Let me tell you what they are. Okay, the first case is if you duplicate content on your own website, do not duplicate content on your own website. Think about it if you have an article or a blog on your site. Do not have it more than once. So, if you post an article called Blue widgets are great. Do not post the same article again on the same website. That would make no sense. It would confuse the search engines, okay? And it would just be a bizarre thing to do. So, do not duplicate your own content on your own site. Or I guess I should say do not duplicate content on your own site because somebody is going to say, "Well, what if you steal it from someone else?" By the way, don't steal content from different websites, okay? Right now, we're talking about whether duplicate content is a thing or not. We're not talking about if it's a good idea to go steal other people's content. Do not steal other people's content because while it's not a problem from the search engines standpoint, it's a problem potentially from a legal standpoint. And it's just being kind of rude to somebody else's content anyway. So, just don't, okay? Just don't. I can't stop you, but don't. So, anyways, look, if you duplicate content on your own website and then you experience concerns like keyword cannibalization, or penalties, or whatever, well, it's probably because you duplicated content on your own website. So, stop it, okay? It is also a problem if you duplicate content on a different website on your same hosting account, okay? Let me give you an example. This is what one of our clients did a long time ago. This is also the client that I talked about in Episode 6, which is called the best and worst clients I've ever had and what I learned from them. Anyway, so this client was managing a website except for the fact that they wanted us to manage their website, which is not a whole big problem. Just go listen to the episode. Anyway, what they didn't tell me was that they had a different domain on the same hosting account, and they copied their website onto that domain, okay? Like an exact copy of it, and they didn't tell us. And so, one day, I sign in to check the SERPs, you know, SERPs, where are you ranking? S-E-R-P search engine results pages, and by the way, if you're unfamiliar with the term SERPs, I know everybody who listens to Grumpy SEO Guy is very familiar with that term, but if you're unfamiliar with that term, go listen to Episode 35, which is called if you're not tracking your SERPs, you're not doing SEO. And that's Episode 35. So, anyway, I signed in one day to check their SERPs, and I noticed that they had, like, disappeared, and I was like, wait a minute, why is this happening? We were ranking really well, and now we've just completely disappeared. And I was like, what's going on? So, I was looking at their website, and there was no changes, and I was looking at their backlinks, and there was no changes, and there didn't seem to be any penalties, and I'm like, why did they disappear? And I could not figure out what was going on. And then I signed in to their hosting account, which, by the way, they gave me access to it, and that's not part of SEO, but I couldn't figure out anything else. Let me just log in and see what else is going on. And I saw this other website listed, I'm sorry, not their hosting account, their registrar account, and I saw this other website in there, and I'm like, what is this? And so, I accessed that website, and it was a literal copy of the website that my agency was working on, a literal copy, and so my best approximation of what happened is that domain was actually older, and so when they copied every piece of content over, I think the search engine said, okay, this website is older, so we're going to show this one instead, and I don't quote me as that being an actual thing, or I can transpire, but it was the weirdest thing, and they had just made that copy of the website recently. And so, I'm like, guys, what is this? And they were like, oh, we're using this website to try some stuff out on, and I'm like, oh, please don't do anything before asking us. Not because I want to be in charge of everything, but so this kind of thing doesn't happen. So anyway, we took that website offline, and then the original one appeared back in the results again. So, here's my point, though. Duplicate content, as you will learn in a minute, is not even a problem, but in this particular case, I think it was a problem because they were on the same hosting account, okay? So, like, the same registrar account, so I think that might cause a problem. So anyway, duplicate content is not a thing except in those two cases. One, if you duplicate content on the same domain, and two, if you copy everything to a different domain on the same registrar and on the same host, and I don't even know if they had copied like an article if that would have been a problem, I think it's because they copied everything, okay? Like, they copied everything. When you loaded the website, it was exactly the same as the other one. So, I think that was the problem. But anyway, if you're not copying content on the same website, and if you're not copying content on the same host on the same registrar, right, like copying a website basically, I don't think duplicate content is a problem. I've literally never seen it be a problem. Now, here's Rama to give an example, because somebody is going to say, "Well, grab a SEO guide to say that duplicate content is bad, and you say that content is king. You don't duplicate your content because that's a penalty." No, it's not. Also, stop listening to people that tell you content is king. I feel like you should believe by now that it is not king, and if you don't, listen to literally any episode or go do SEO, because if you have ever done SEO, you will comprehend that content is not king. Anyway, let me give you a couple examples, and then I'm going to give you an actual example. Okay, example number one, medical research. If you have ever searched for something in the health field and you get actual medical papers that have been published in the results, you will notice that there are multiple websites that have the same papers. I'm talking about actual articles published in medical journals. I'm not talking about some trendy health website. Anyway, they all have the same exact papers, same exact content because they're exactly the same paper and they're published on numerous websites that are all on page one. If duplicate content was a problem, okay, only one of those websites would be on page one and the rest of them would not appear since they would have duplicate content, okay, but they do appear because duplicate content is not a problem. Example number two, lyric websites. If you've ever searched for the words to the music that you like, okay, it's your favorite songs, okay, every page on page one has the same content because they all have the same lyrics to the song and you're going to say, well, sometimes you get some of the lyrics wrong and you're going to throw it's not duplicate content because they have an extra course in there and it's the same thing. Just stop. It's the same thing, okay? Like 99% of it is the same thing. It's pretty much the same, all right? Lyrics websites are proof that duplicate content is not a problem. So ignoring lyric websites and medical research, let me give you an example that I literally just found the other day. The topic here that I was trying to learn about, like this actually happened when I was looking for something, when I was researching something online, okay? I was searching for, I was looking to see if uncured bacon is considered ultra-processed. So, okay, a little bit of background history. You know what bacon is? So bacon is cured, okay? What that means is they like mixed stuff into it or something as a preservative, okay? And these preservatives are apparently bad for you, okay? They're apparently unhealthy. So, a couple companies make something called uncured bacon, which does not have these, you know, harmful substances in it. It's not preserved. It's not supposed to be quite so unhealthy. It's uncured and it's supposed to be healthier. But I started thinking to myself, you know what, is this even true or is this like just some content as king nonsense, right? And then the other term that you have to know here is the term ultra-processed, okay? Ultra-processed is a term that just refers to food that just has many things done to it. And generally speaking, look, this isn't a health podcast and I'm not really informed about a lot of the stuff, but ultra-processed is supposed to be like not the greatest kind of food in the world because like the more stuff they do to food, like the worse it is for you. And ultra-processed I think is like the worst classification of food or something like that. So, supposedly choosing food that is not ultra-processed is better for you. So anyway, I was curious, is uncured bacon ultra-processed? So I googled and you can check this yourself, okay? So let me just be clear, today is the 14th, okay? And I know that search engine results change all the time. So maybe tomorrow or maybe when this episode gets published, it's going to be different, so I just wanted to mention when I'm doing it. Anyways, so I googled, is uncured bacon ultra-processed? Okay, you can google it yourself. Okay, the first result is consumerreports.org. They are a legit authority website. Consumer Reports is an authority website, okay? So they have, the first result is uncured bacon better for you, consumerreports.org. Okay, the third result, WashingtonPost.com. That's like a newspaper, okay? They're pretty common. I think everybody has heard of Washington Post. So we got two authority sites here, okay? This one is called uncured bacon isn't any healthier, here's why. If you click on those articles, they are the same article. Now, when you click on the Washington Post one, it might try to get you to buy a subscription. Maybe try it from a different computer. I'm not telling you to buy a subscription, but I'm just telling you, they're the same article. So here's the thing. If duplicate content was a thing, these articles would both not appear at the top of the search engines, okay? If duplicate content was a concern, one of them would rank, and the other one would not rank. But here we have two articles that are literally exactly the same, and they're both ranking in position one and position three. Feels to me like duplicate content is not a thing. So anyways, next time somebody tells you, don't write duplicate content because search engines do not reward duplicate content. Yes, they do it doesn't matter who cares. If duplicate content was a concern, and it's not, but if it was, both of these websites would not rank. One of them would rank, and the other one would be off of the top page because it would be having a duplicate content penalty. That is not the case. So I'm not sure what to tell you other than duplicate content is not a thing. It's not a concern. Do not worry about it, but also don't reuse other people's content because that's just obnoxious. So that's, that's all I'm going to say about that. Okay, part two of this episode is totally different. Fans of Grumpy SEO Guy may have listened to the previous episode, which was about SEO job interviews. And in that episode, I shared some questions from SEO job interviews that I went on. And if you remember, I told you about one interview I was on, where after the second interview, they gave me an assignment, which is free consulting, by the way. And I couldn't remember the questions, but I found the email with the questions in it, and I'm going to tell you what they are. So look, I'm not going to share too much about the interviews in this episode because if you really want to know, just go listen to episode 73, okay, if you want to know about it. But basically, I had a bunch of interviews that seemed like they changed from interviews into consulting sessions, like the person was trying to get as much knowledge for me as they could rather than see if I was qualified for the job. And then after the second interview, I had a call with HR and they said, "We really like you and we're going to give you a project. And if you do the project and they like your presentation, then we're going to make you a job offer." And a couple red flags went up because that seems like free consulting. Anyway, you can go listen to that episode for more information. But anyway, so this interview, the second half of the interview was basically about doing a CMS migration. CMS means content management system. If you want to know what that is, think of WordPress. WordPress is a content management system. There are different CMSs, but WordPress is just an example that probably you have heard of. Anyways, here's the email they sent me. Analyze our website. Assuming the website will be migrated to the same URL, but to a new CMS, and this move will also include an update to the code and copy, please prepare the following. One, a bullet point plan of the necessary steps needed to get a scope of the work for SEO, e.g., step one, crawl website, step two, mapping, etc. Two, based on the migration steps created from the point above, provide a timeline of what you would do and when as the SEO expert working on the migration. Three, map/mention, all necessary SEO steps or checks needed to take the name of the company website from where its current state to a successful migration. Anyway, so that was email number one. Okay, so as I mentioned in that episode, I emailed them back some questions because I wasn't, I thought that was kind of vague and annoying. And so I emailed them back some questions. Here's what I wrote, and here's the reply. I said, can I assume the following, and by the way, again, I know I mentioned this previously, but I did not want to do this assignment because a CMS migration is not what I want to be working on. Okay, this was like a six to 12 month project from what they told me. You can hear my thoughts about CMS migration and SEO in the other episode, but that is not a good use of my skill set. Like I did not want to be on this project in the first place. And number two, this seems an awful lot like free consulting to me because it was their own website. Okay, and as I mentioned that episode, I think that numerous companies disguise their SEO needs as job interviews, get smart people to do free audits for them as part of an interview, which I'm air quoting right now. Okay, and then not hire that person, but utilize their plan for your own website. Okay, because why else would you ask somebody to do a free analysis of your website for a project that you just spent 30 minutes telling me you were actually going to do? Like you're not going to do something with that information? Okay, come on. Anyway, so here the whole thing felt shady. Listen to that other episode if you want more. Anyway, here's my questions. Can I assume for the sake of this task? One, the URL of the individual pages may be changing. I know the domain is not changing. Two, the content is possibly changing or that we are including in the possibility of changing some of the content. And then I said, moreover, what is the estimated timeframe for actually copying, migrating the content over from the previous to new CMS? I'd like to include this in my schedule. Okay, fair enough questions, I guess, whatever. Here's the responses. I've added some more information. Hope it helps. There will be a dedicated team for each skill set needed on the migration. At the very least, that would be design UX copy dev and webops to build the pages in the CMS. And by the way, side note, do you hear all those departments that are involved in this? That's because CMS migration is not an SEO task. Okay, it is, it is consult with SEO a little bit, but it's not really an SEO task. Anyway, back to the point. Here's the other answer. The goal of the website migration is to improve SEO traffic and overall conversions, not just move it from one CMS to another, so there can be changes to all website elements. Content, URL, CTAs, links, menu, footer, et cetera, if they will have a positive impact on SEO rankings. And then he wrote, and then they wrote, when do you think we could catch up to go through what you will prepare? And then I was unsatisfied with the answer to those questions because that did not really answer my questions. So I wrote back again, and I was basically like, look, this is fine and all, but do you have any keywords that you actually want to rank for? Since you just told me, okay, that the purpose of this whole CMS migration is to increase SEO traffic, or anyway, so that was the email that they sent me. Anyway, look, I sent them one more email because I still thought that they were not answering my questions, and then they wrote back another email that basically was just as vague as the previous one. So I'm like, all right, whatever. I'm like, do you guys want to meet next Thursday to go over this? And I never heard back from them again. So maybe they thought I asked too many questions. I don't know. But here's the other point about that. He told me that this is like a six to 12 month project. If I'm not allowed to ask questions on a project that's going to require six to 12 months, are you kidding? Like, I'm joking. I don't actually think the reason was that I asked too many questions. Like, I was actually kidding when I said that, but the whole project was weird. I gotta mention again, I was not really putting forth a lot of effort on this task because I thought that it was dumb and I didn't really want to work on this project anyway. Okay, but I was slightly curious, but I was also like, no, this is dumb. And like, I really didn't. Well, the whole thing felt wrong to me. Like, I just didn't want to do it. CMS migration is not, is not really a big SEO project. You know, it's like, whatever, it doesn't matter. And then finally, so I'm like, fine, I'm like, do you want to meet? Let me know a time that works for you. And I never heard back from them ever. So I guess what happened with some other applicant gave them a plan that they liked and they used that plan and probably didn't hire that person either. So it's fine with me. Like, I literally didn't even care. You know how there's always that like apprehension. Like, when you send an email and then you're like, okay. Every time I check my email now, I might get a reply from them and you're like a little bit like anxious for a little bit. I had that feeling because I'm like, oof, I really don't even want to do this in the first place. But I never got a response from them. And this was, oh, this was like about more, I'm looking at my email. This was more than two years ago. So anyways, yeah, I don't care. Whatever. Anyway, anyway, so anyway, that was the questions in the email that I mentioned. And like, I emailed them a couple of questions and they responded back because I thought it was kind of vague. And I'm like, this isn't even really an SEO project anyway. I'm like, I'm happy to lend my thoughts from an SEO perspective. But this is not a six to 12 month SEO project. It's not, you know, whatever. So anyway, then finally, I'm like, so do you want to meet? I like such and such a time next week to go over it and I never heard back from them again. So I was like, that's fine with me because I don't want to do this anyway. And again, let me just state that it was, this isn't, this is not like, I'm not but hurt. I'm not like, oh, I didn't want to work with him anyway. Like, you know, like, you know, like you, you like invite someone out on a date and they say no, and you're just like, I don't want to go out with you anyway. Like, obviously you did. That's why you mentioned it in the first place. I actually was uninterested in this project the entire time because I thought it was a dumb project. No offense to them. I'm sure they needed a CMS migration. But like, I just don't think that CMS is the reason that you're not ranking. Okay, but you guys do you guys. That's cool too. So anyway, I wanted to include these questions in this email. In this podcast episode, because I did not include them in the last one and I did read the other questions from that other interview, but not from this one. So anyway, I hope this helps maybe provide, I really, really think it's unlikely that if you go into an SEO job interview, they're going to talk about CMS migrations and that they're going to ask you this kind of questions. But at least it provides a little bit more specifics for what you might experience on an SEO job interview. But honestly, go play episode 73 if you want to learn more about the kind of companies that I interviewed with and like what the whole process was like. Anyway, that was a fun episode to do and I hope that you guys enjoyed listening to it because I get a lot of questions from people that are going on job interviews. And yeah, I was like, "Well, here's literally the questions they asked me. I hope this helps you." So anyway, I don't know what else to say. I feel like this was two episodes in one. We talked about duplicate content and how there's no penalties associated with it as long as it's not on the same website or on a different website on the same server and the same registrar. And we talked about another SEO job interview question. So I hope this was a helpful episode and now it's over. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. And if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is grumpyseoguy. You can visit the grumpyseoguy subreddit or you can email me at hello@grumpyseoguy.com. If you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so at patreon.com/grumpyseoguy. And I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpyseoguy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday when we talk about a glimpse inside the shady world of internet marketing. [Music]