It may have been unintentional, an oversight, or a genuine error. But apart from having ethical implications, it can be bad for business too. Why? Here we go with a few practical reasons that make sense in the online space.
It affects website traffic
Did you know that Google doesn’t like duplicate content? If it spots two sites or pages with the same content, there’s a chance that both sites won’t get thrown up on search. Bad for the company with the original content and bad for you, if you’ve emulated them. After all, what is the point of having a website when the copy is actually driving away traffic?
It can have the same set of SEO errors
The content from the other site could be dated. It may have paid scanty attention to key words. It could have had the wrong set of tags. If you do a blind copy-paste, you carry all these errors onto your site too. Effect: you have lost out any SEO advantage.
And now, for the killer reason. It’s easy to spot duplicate content with online tools. So if the other company figures out that there are folks online using the same content as theirs, there could be unpleasant publicity and even legal suits.
Unless you are in a business which believes that any publicity (even negative) is better than no publicity, how can this be good for you?
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