One of the oldest and still most talked about SEO topic is duplicate content. While there has never really been a duplicate content penalty, Google does not want to rank to 5 identical pieces of content in the first five positions in Google search. So what do you do if you have content that is similar or the same as your competitors?

Add value.

If you have the same product descriptions as every other e-commerce site on the web, you need to do something to make your product page stand out. How do you do that? You add more value to that content on that page. You add unique content on top of that content, you change the content to tailer it to your specific audience, you add deeper images and videos, you add whatever you can to add value above and beyond what is currently ranking for that content.

John Mueller of Google was recently asked about copied or duplicate content and SEO and he has a great one liner on Twitter “I’d focus on the value that you’re adding, not on the content you’re copying.”

Here are those tweets:

I’d focus on the value that you’re adding, not on the content you’re copying.

— 🦙 johnmu.xml (personal) 🦙 (@JohnMu) May 4, 2022

It is really a great line and content writers should be thinking this when they are copying content, like a line off of Twitter.

Forum discussion at Twitter.