Copy & Paste: an SEO NO-NO

I'm an SEO ninja, in case you didn't know.  I've been doing quite a bit of research lately, figuring out the ever-evolving, seriously convoluted world of search engine optimization.  And here's what I've figured out- there's a heck of a lot of stuff out there that affects how your site is ranked on Google and other search engines. 

If you are dying to know all my serious ninja moves, you're going to have to pay me to go all Jackie Chan on your site, but here's my free tip of the day:

Don't repeat content on multiple domains.

Sounds pretty simple, right?  Well, apparently not.  One of the clients that I'm working with has three different websites that draw quite a bit of traffic.  My job is to get in there and make the sites work even harder, and as I was digging through every inch of his content, I got some serious deja vu.  I was reading the same stuff over and over again.  To save time and effort, (let's face it, we all have to find some shortcuts somewhere) my client had copy & pasted content from one website over to another one of his sites.

Big no-no.  To Google, you're (A) Not adding any value with your site since Google's already read this on one of your other sites, and (B) Google doesn't love plagiarism.  (I actually don't know about that last part.  I'm just guessing that this is one of the ways they prevent people from being rewarded for stealing content from other's sites.)  Makes sense, though, right?

So, yeah, it stinks- if you have several domains that cover similar topics, you might be tempted to copy and paste.  DON'T!!  Remember, in SEO, content is king- original content, that is. ;-)