The phrase "duplicate content" is mentioned a lot when it comes to website SEO. Your website ranking will be lower if you have duplicate content issues.
Duplicate content on your website is a result of sloppy programming or setup. In reality, your website will feed the search engines the same information multiple times. In response, the search engine will remove you from the SERPs until you fix the problem.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are all fighting for the best "user experience." That experience includes not including badly functioning websites. It would be frustrating for the all of us if we had to deal with that every day.
On the other hand, something that we all seem to be dealing with every day is duplicate status updates on Facebook.
Just because you have the ability to cross-post between social websites does not mean you should.
You need to determine where your primary users follow you. It could be your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube or even Photobucket. Then make that social site your primary site where you post your new content and provide feedback.
Facebook has made it very easy to become your primary site, and that's what the problem is.
You need to prevent duplicate status posts from appearing on your Facebook Wall every time you also post a status message on another site.
Examples:
* Do not post link shares to your blog on Facebook if your blog already feeds your Facebook account.
* Do not post similar status updates to Facebook if your Twitter already fed the same message.
* Do not post a link to your Photobucket on Facebook if the newly posted photos on Photobucket were automatically fed.
Examine the settings you have for all your social networks. Make sure you keep track of what network will automatically repost to another network then make yourself a standard new content posting strategy so it does not duplicate itself.
User experience is key. Just like the search engines that will block you because you did something wrong, people will become annoyed and ignore you if you over-saturate your social networks.
You should think twice the next time a social site asks you to share your information automatically with Facebook.
