Hi, I am doing work for a company and they are ranking high for a key phrase. The problem is they need to also rank for another key phrase that a competitor uses. Is it okay to duplicate the home page and add this new key phrase so I have two pages, one with the key phrase with which thay are ranking highly(so they can stay in that position) and another page with the new competitors keyphrase. Is this the right thing to do, because I know Google penalizes for duplicate content, even if the pages are from the same domain? What other methods are there to solve this problem. Any help much appeciated. Thanks, C
If its a new keyword, content should be changed. Otherwise your already ranking well kw might loose some ranking for duplicating the page.
Thanks for that. Another quick question. Say I had a website which did Holiday Rentals and I wanted to target the American Market so decided I needed a new page with the key phrase Vacation Rentals, could I use exactly the same content from my original page and substitute the word "Holiday" for "Vacation" or would this cause problems because most of the contant would be the same. Thanks again.
Don't duplicate the content. Rewrite the page text and change the page titles, page descriptions, h1 tags, etc. or you'll find one of the pages falling out of the SERPs completely because of duplicate content.
You shouldn't duplicate the content, as google will usually ignore the duplicate IMO. Change the content to focus on the new keyword and then add a link to the existing page that is ranking well.
I had just finished a project where my client achieved the top position for keywords including the city. He wanted me to do the same for another city. After changing the content and description and title tags, I failed to change the herf links. Still can't find the new site.
Each page needs to have a different, unique content, that is, if you want to get a good ranking. Rewrite everything then insert the relevant keywords.