Repetition can be a very good thing for Google.  It can also be a very bad thing.  It depends on what you are repeating and where you are repeating it.

As I discussed previously, anything that is worth saying once is worth saying again.  Google looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on the same page, and uses this to determine what the page is about.

Google also looks to see which words and phrases re-appear on multiple pages.  It uses this form of repetition to identify duplicate content, which it will then omit from its indexing.

This is actually done for your benefit.  If Google was not on the lookout for duplicate content, unscrupulous designers could take the same limited amount of copy and shift it around to make a minimal site seem well developed to the search engines.  They’d much rather reward the sites that actually put in the effort to produce new content.

However, this does mean that you should be mindful of what content re-appears on multiple pages.  Watch what you repeat.  Navigation, footers, common disclaimers, recurring sidebars, and contact information are all probably part of your web design.  You would do more harm than good if you removed it all, but you should know how much of your page is dedicated to non-unique text.

Google knows this sort of content exists, but it can’t really tell it apart from any other content.  In order to keep Google from thinking you’re trying to run a scam, you should try to make sure that your unique copy outweighs the non-unique copy.

If this is not possible with your website, you may wish to speak with a web designer or search engine optimizer about changing some of your recurring copy into a form that people can read but which Google cannot.  But that approach, while it is useful in solving some problems, has others of it’s own, and really deserves it’s own discussion.

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