The Dangers of Following the Crowd for Search Engine Optimization
Link: https://www.virtualstacks.com/dont-be-a-copycat-how-copied-and-duplicate-content-hurt-seo/
With the significant rise in internet connectivity and efficient web search over the past three decades, search engine optimization (SEO) has become an increasingly competitive and lucrative market. Website owners compete for high page rank in order to be placed higher on relevant search engine results lists, because they know that higher ranking corresponds to greater number of clicks and overall website traffic.
In order to “game the system,” it is tempting to copy the format and text of websites that have high page rank in an attempt to mimic their success. After all, perhaps these sites know something you don’t about the SEO algorithm and copying their strategy will allow page rank to percolate down to you –– but this is exactly what the linked article “Don’t be a Copycat –– How Copied and Duplicate Content Hurt SEO” warns against.
This article warns of the dangers of simply “following the crowd” in an attempt to rank higher on search engine results lists like Google, since “search engine algorithms are designed only to promote one version of any piece of content, and the original website of the content is much more likely to be ranked far higher than a less popular website with copied content.” If such content is relevant to the page, it is better to include external links to these relevant authoritative sources (which subsequently can increase your authority as a hub). The article additionally links to SEO best practices, such as choosing quality keywords (but not spamming them) and optimizing title tags and meta descriptions.
The advice and warnings from this article are relevant to multiple areas of recent study in this course, including structure of the web (PageRank, ingredients of modern search ranking) and the idea of “following the crowd” with our simple model of decision-making with crowds.
Recall that search engines like Google assign PageRank by iterating through the Hub-Authority update rule many times and normalizing the scores. The goal of any website is to obtain a high hub or authority score, which requires knowing or guessing at the innerworkings of Google’s assignment algorithm. Those websites with high page rank can be assumed to be relevant or popular, which leads to copy-cats who attempt to mimic the strategies of these more popular sites. This is an example where simply “following the crowd” is a dominated strategy –– although the authors of webpages react to what Google does, Google also reacts to what the authors of webpages do and adjusts its algorithm accordingly.
Indeed, search engine optimization is a delicate balance between competing webpage authors and an ever-changing and ever-complex search optimization algorithm.