Content is king, they say. This is generally true and in fact, a lot of people often copy and paste content to their websites and social media pages once they find the content compelling and find it valuable for their marketing efforts.
However, this has been an excruciating dilemma for journalists and copywriters, whose works have been plagiarized time and again with consequences that affect their work.
For instance, when your real estate page content is found in more than one place all over the internet, search engines have difficulty finding which version is relevant to post on the results page. This can be frustrating especially when your original work was copied on a different website and ranked higher than yours in a search engine results page (SERP).
Plagiarism: a real estate industry no-no
More writers are finding their original work being copied and pasted blatantly without their permission or proper reference citations.
But this outrage has recently been getting the attention it deserves, as authorities have started clamping down on intellectual property violations, especially plagiarism, and are bent on penalising violators.
The campaigns have been succeeding, and in fact, there have been numerous cases where website owners and social media marketers have been ordered to compensate original sources for copied or plagiarised content.
Always be unique and authentic
If you want to succeed as a real estate blogger, always make sure to make the effort to research and create your own original content. It helps establish your reputation and credibility in the real estate blogging community and your target audience.
Avoid taking short cuts by copying and pasting content from top-ranked websites because it can only cause you to get penalised by Google and duplicate content results in downgrading your site’s authority and affect your rankings.
The impacts of duplicate content in real estate SEO
Duplicate content does not only cover content copied in verbatim, it includes copying material with zero to very minimal modifications made. It also includes having the same content from one page of your website to another page on your site or one of your other websites.
Always remember, DO NOT copy website content to your own real estate website, even if you add citation references such are “original article published at” even when you have secured permission from the author could impact your SEO efforts and, worse, could even get you into legal trouble.
Here’s a simple rule to go by No matter how creative content may be from a website, without permission to use it on your own, don’t do it.
Even if you have the author’s permission, copying it may go against copyright laws and may entail legal repercussions, aside from having your website’s rankings impacted for violations.
How about canonical linking?
Canonical links refer to an HTML element that supports webmasters or website administrators to prevent duplicate content concerns in SEO by determining the preferred or “canonical” version of any webpage.
The main purpose of this is to let search engines determine the original source for content found on multiple sites and URLs.
However, it canonical links will not help if you copied content from your website, rather, it is intended to help the original source of the content and its website.
For instance, when you used syndicated content across websites to reach more potential readers using a canonical link will help signal Google to prioritise the original piece that is found in your website against republished or copied versions elsewhere.
This works for corporate websites because regardless if you have the content published on the main corporate page and in different pages, the canonical link will redirect readers to the corporate page where the original material exists.
So, what is the best content strategy for real estate blogging?
Do not waste your time in using copied or duplicate content, not only would you end up impacting your search engine rankings, you can be liable for intellectual property law violations that could be highly damaging to your reputation and credibility.
Create your own content
Find topics that are relevant and trending in your niche and develop a story around it. There are a lot of research materials regarding your chosen topic online and makes it easy to find data and theories around technical topics you want to tackle.
Repurpose evergreen content
It’s not a bad idea to use existing content, but make good use of your research skills to investigate new perspectives and insights into trending topics.
There’s no complicated formula to come out on top of your real estate blogging efforts, simply being authentic and original can let you go a long, long way.