As mortgage and real estate professionals, many of us work hard at generating our own leads through website(s). After a few experiments with lead services, I can tell you most of them are a serious waste of money!
Where to get content for your site? Can you use it on multiple sites? What about syndicated articles?
The answer here is quite simple -- Google rewards originality, and yes, Googles does penalize sites for having duplicate content.
If you have the same content on multiple web addresses, Google and other search engines may filter out your site from the ranking. In theory, the oldest site should win, and the sites that "copied" your content will be blocked.
But..... it doesn't always work this way. I've had content I wrote on one of my sites copied by someone else, and they ended up ranking and my site was penalized!! If you have one page of duplicate content, or a few paragraphs, you won't see the entire site banned. However, if you leverage lots of the same content throughout your site -- say goodbye to any type of ranking.
This is one knock against syndicating article content out. When people reuse your article -- even though they give you a link and attribute as the author, you run the risk of the search engine using the new article and blocking out your original posting.
This is one of the reasons that cookie-cutter template sites never do well. Imagine hundreds of people with what is in essence the same website with different logos/address and maybe color scheme. None of those sites will ever rank well.
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