A massive mistake people make, especially sales people trying to navigate their way through the social media and blogging landscape, is to copy/paste whole ‘articles’ onto their own websites.  This is a big no-no for several reasons, not the least of which is the impact it can have on your visibility on search engines like Google.

Google Ranking is this mysterious term web marketers use that has the effect of both intriguing and boring most folks.  It’s like wireless communications; you know it exists, but you’re not quite sure how it works.

If it makes you feel better, no one knows 100% how Google Ranking works.  We do have some ideas, though, based on what Google has been kind enough to tell us.  Back in the heady first days of the Internet, search engines were pretty straightforward with how sites were ranked.  Unfortunately, this led to many people gaming the system.  Today, there are guides and best practices you have to follow if you want your website to show up on a search.

One of the biggest mistakes made is putting an article from another website or canned marketing system, in full and unaltered, onto your own site.

Google, and the other search engines, ‘read’ your website – heck, they read all the websites.  How frequently depends on how frequently you change things.  If you haven’t changed your website in five years, chances are Google hasn’t been to your site in a very long time (and we need to talk).  When they read your site, every word is indexed and stored in a database.  When someone then goes to Google.com and does a search, a query is run against the database and results are shown.  This is where PageRank comes into play.  PangeRank determines a websites relevancy to a specific search.  The higher your relevancy, the higher up in the search you will appear.

PangeRank can be affected by the content on your site.  For example, in March of this year, Google De-Indexed sites that were sharing content and links.  You may have seen these kinds of offers in your inbox – companies promising you good, SEO keyword laden content and linkbacks to ensure ‘top level’ results.  All you have do to is sign-up and put the articles on your site or blog. But Google hates that.  If Google sees the same article or blog post on a hundred sites, or more, it lowers the PageRank of all those sites.  This could put you on the bottom of the search, defeating the purpose of signing up in the first place.

This is similar to ‘in the can’ marketing platforms like Act!, Sales Force CRM and others, where you sign up and have access to letters and articles you can repurpose for your own marketing.  Unfortunately, most people don’t repurpose them – they copy/paste them whole and go.  Again, if a hundred, or a thousand, or even ten thousand people have all signed up for the same service, it doesn’t matter what city, state or market you are in – the Internet is worldwide, and Google will ding you.

My suggestion isn’t a popular one with busy sales people, but you should write your own content.  Think about it this way, your daily life is probably laid out in your calendar already, so carve out an hour a week to sit down and write a blog post about something your customers, or potential customers, would be interested in or that you’d like them to know.  Close the door, turn the radio off, put your cell phone on mute, and just do it.

200 words on a blog post is quick, easy, and will reward you in the long run far better than a canned system with a monthly fee.