What is Duplicate Content and How Does it Affect Your SEO?

What is Duplicate Content and How Does it Affect Your SEO?

What is Duplicate Content, and How Does it Affect Your SEO?

It is not surprising for content to appear in various places online, like websites and social media platforms. A blog post, company story, or product description is sometimes challenging to create, and when you come across one, it is enticing to use it everywhere. But the good news is that duplicate content is okay. Still, it can negatively impact your seo, so next time you think about duplicate content issues, remember you will need to initiate an appropriate approach. Or else it could result in less value for your site visitors. In this piece of writing, we will discuss a complete guide to duplicate content and figure out how it affects your website’s seo. 

What Creates Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content refers to sections of content that are identical to one another or very similar; it is also known as near-duplicate content. Near-duplicate content refers to pieces of content with only minor differences. However, having similar content is natural, and sometimes it becomes unavoidable as you quote another article on the internet. 

The different types of duplicate content:

There are mainly two types of duplicate content, and they are-

• Internal duplicate content occurs when one domain develops the same content through multiple internal URLs.
• External duplicate content- is also known as cross-domain content, where two or more different domains have the exact page copy indexed by the search engine. 

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/hpjSkU2UYSU 

Is Duplicate Content Bad For Your Search Ranking?

Many people think that Google penalizes a website for duplicate content. Still, Google themselves have confirmed that they do not penalize a website for duplicate content unless, on any rare occasion, you try to play the google algorithm. In addition, Google filters identical content, which has the same impact as a penalty, i.e. loss of ranking of the web pages. 

Duplicate content confuses Google and obliges the search engine to choose which of the identical pages it should rank in the top results. Regardless of who creates the content, there is a high possibility that the original page will not be the one to go for the top search results. This is only one reason why duplicate content harms your search ranking; below, we have also mentioned some other reasons. If you have a question in mind, do duplicate page titles affect seo? Then read on the issues below. 

Duplicate Content Issues:

• On-page elements-

To avoid duplicate content issues, you must ensure that each page of your website has a unique page title and meta description in the page’s HTML code. You must also have special headings (H1, H2, H3, and more) that are different from other pages on your website. 

The page title, meta description, and headings create a minimum amount of content on a page. However, it is safe to keep your site out of duplicate content. Many times google takes a snippet from your content and presents it as a meta description. This is also an excellent way to have search engines see value in your meta descriptions. However, if you cannot create unique meta descriptions for numerous pages of your site, you can skip the part. However, writing a unique meta description is still better as it is essential to boost click-throughs. 

• Product Description-

Developing a unique product description is difficult for many e-commerce companies as it needs to invest a lot of time to write an original illustration for each product. You must provide each source with a unique description if you sell your products through a third-party retailer website. However, it would be best if you remembered that product variations such as size or colour should not be on separate pages. Use web design elements so all variations can be kept on one page. This unique content seo will help you avoid duplicity of content. 

• URL frameworks-

URL frameworks are another common issue with duplicate content. Some websites use URL parameters to create page URL variations that sometimes lead to search engines indexing different versions of URLs.  

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/zIwAchjDirM 

• WWW, HTTP, and the Trailing Slash-

An overlooked area of internal duplicate content is among URLs with:

www (http://www.xyz.com) and without www (http://xyz.com)

HTTP (http://www.xyz.com) and HTTPS (https://www.xyz.com)

A trailing slash at the end of the URL (http://www.xyz.com/) and without a trailing slash (http://www.xyz.com) 

An easy way to check for such issues is to take a section of unique text from your ranking pages, put the reader in quotes, and search for it on Google. Then, Google will search for the exact string of text. If more than one page shows up in the results, you must examine closely to determine why this is happening. 

How To Resolve Duplicate Content Issues?

There are some quick and easy ways to detect duplicate content issues, which are discussed below-

• Search operators-

Type “site: your site title: keyword” into Google to find pages on your site that have similar titles. However, you can also search “intitle: your title” to see external web pages that match your tag. 

• Duplicate content checker-

Various free tools are available online that help you to enter a URL and look for pages that share the exact URL or indicate plagiarism content for website. 

• Google search console-

Using either of the free tools, you can check if two versions of the same URL appear in your reports. At this point, you want to look for similar URLs except for their tags, HTTP vs HTTPS and more. 

• Rewrite your pages-

When it comes to duplication of your content, the best way is to rewrite the content to be unique. This will allow you to create original and high-quality information.

• Canonical tags-

Having unique content on every page of your website is impossible, especially when you have an eCommerce site with various listings. To avoid the copy website pages, the best solution is to include a rel=” canonical” tag so that Google and other search engines will understand which page is the preferred one. So that the preferred one will be crawled and indexed. 

• 301 direct-

Sometimes, you must replace an old website page or want all your HTTP links to be direct to HTTPS. Here you need to use 301 redirects to divert the traffic and seo value to the current page. 

Final Thoughts:

It is always better to check and search for duplicate content from time to time. However, the process can become complicated when you own a large site. If you need professional help, the team of ITDwell can help you audit the site and handle other potential issues limiting your seo growth.