Page 14 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Is Duplicate Content Negative for Site SEO Even if it’s Beneficial for
Internal Linking?

Test Setup: March 13, 2020

We set up a test with the hypothesis that duplicate content won't hurt your site, provided it does
not target a SERP your site is targeting and is beneficial for inner linking. We took 3 pieces of
content from another website blog post, that does not target any of our search terms, then chose
one of the target pages to inner link to with long tail anchors.

Our previous tests showed duplicate content didn't really seem to hurt a website, which made
sense as big news sites and press release sites do this all the time. We had also found that this
content would often get impressions or ranking for other keywords and long-tail search. Both
pages would never show in the same SERP and generally, the original page stayed for their
original term, but not always when we curated multiple pieces of content into one article.

Since Google was indexing this content and even showing it in the SERPs, we figured it must
have some inner linking value. So we began a second test on our current testing site, publishing
content from other websites' blogs on our website and keeping everything the same except
hosting the images locally and adjusting the inner linking to fit our website URLs.

Test Results: March 27, 2020

As you can see below, impressions grew significantly. We also started noticing a lot more traction
for the long tail terms we used for inner linking, which we believe is directly related to content on
the site. These results lead us to believe our original hypothesis holds true: inner linking
generated from offsite curated/duplicate content does not hurt your site and is beneficial to SEO
rankings. However, we need repeatable results to solidify that statement.

14