Google’s John Mueller talked about how Google may perceive the practice of using your own content you already wrote on one site, and then copying it over to another site or two, with some tweaks to fit that site. Is this considered plagiarizing content? Is this doorway pages? Will the content do well?
The question came up at the 7:36 mark into the video from this Friday. The question was “Is Google okay with publishers plagiarizing their own content? For example, I wrote an affiliate article suggesting something for mom. Can I copy the content of that article to write more articles for maybe a sister or a wife or an aunt or a grandmother?”
Self Plagiarism?
The technical answer is this is really not considered plagiarism if you own the content. Meaning, you can’t plagiarize yourself. John said “so I don’t know like what what the full definition of plagiarizing is but it seems like if you’re re using your own content that’s not really plagiarizing, well at least the way that I understand it.”
Will Google Rank Self-Copied Content?
But in terms of how Google will treat content that you copy from one site to the next, well, that might not do too well – but you can do what you want. He said, just tweaking some words from content on one page and copying it over to a new page or new site, probably won’t add much value and might not rank well. He said “from from Google’s point of view if you’re taking content from your own website and publishing that again with some elements of the page change, that’s essentially up to you. And it’s something where my assumption is in many cases you’re not providing a lot of value by just copying the existing article and changing some of the words on it.”
He said it is probably not the best SEO strategy for you to take, John said “so my feeling is from a strategic point of view, probably you would be better suited writing something unique and compelling for those topics or to create one article that covers kind of these different variations. So that’s something kind of like from a strategic point of view that I would recommend.”
But again, you can do what you want, he said adding “But purely from a policy point of view i don’t think there’s anything specifically in the way of you taking individual articles and then making, I don’t know, a handful of copies of that. So that’s something where like from from a purely a practical point of view, that’s kind of up to you. But my recommendations really kind of make fewer articles that are actually really good.”
Doorway Pages
The one exception is if you are doing this with a doorway page mentality. He said “The one extreme case here that can pop up if you’re like really intensely copying your own content is that you end up creating doorway pages and that is essentially taking one piece of content and creating lots and lots of variations just with different words in it. And that’s something that would be against our webmaster guidelines so that’s something I would watch out for. And also that’s something where you’re creating a ton of really, I don’t know, lower quality, I don’t know, I would almost say junk pages for your website which is essentially just like fluff that doesn’t provide any unique value overall. And instead of kind of diluting the content of your website like that, I would recommend focusing on making the primary content of your website a lot stronger instead. So that’s kind of my recommendation there.”
The final point he said was “So if you’re asking is Google okay with it? Well it’s like you can do whatever you want on your website but that doesn’t mean that Google is going to value it.”
Here is the video embed:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
