Know-How Duplicate Content Impact the SEO and Ways to Fix

What Is Meant By Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is nothing about the same content available in multiple places on the internet. In other words, it is the content adding little to no value for the visitors. Thus, pages with no-to-little body content will consider duplicate content. It can exist as the site owners have developed it on purpose or can result from plagiarism.

When you intentionally reuse text in multiple places on the website or social media, it represents that you are developing duplicate content. The site owner will discover that the competing website has published the exact copy of their content in case of plagiarism. Two major types of duplicate content exist – internal and external.

1. The internal duplicate content is nothing but a domain that creates duplicate content via multiple internal URLs on the same site.
2. The external duplicate content occurs when two or more various domains have the same page. It is also called cross-domain duplicates.

Both internal and external duplicate content can happen as near-duplicates or exact-duplicates. So, site owners must find such a web page or content to avoid significant problems.

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What Will Happen If You Have Duplicate Content?

If your site has many duplicate contents, the following things will happen. It also misleads your SEO strategies and other marketing efforts. As a result, you will not achieve the desired results and completely lose all your time, money, and effort.

1. Your site will get a lower ranking in the search results. It indicates you will not become much visible to the potential audiences.
2. You will experience low website traffic, leads, and sales. It eventually impacts your business and needs immediate action to recover.
3. Your website will get more dissatisfied users because you cannot provide the best search experience for them.
4. It also minimizes the opportunity to reach new users, and thus you will lose sales heavily.

The only way to avoid these nightmares is to take a proactive approach to duplicate content. Never take it lightly because it puts your site’s credibility and reliability into the ground. Even though your site features some identical or non-identical content, put effort and creating the website with the original content.

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Reasons for Duplicate Content Terrible For SEO

Did you know that Google does not impose any penalty for duplicate content? But, it filters the identical (same) content that has a massive impact as the penalty. It results in a loss of rankings for your website/web pages. Usually, duplicate content confuses the search engines such as Google and then forces it to select which identical web pages it should rank higher.

In many cases, the chance of original content not being selected for the top search result is higher irrespective of who delivered the content. It is the most common reason that duplicate content is bad for SEO. Likewise.

While several versions of content are available on the internet, it is tough for search engines to find which version to index and show in the search results. It minimizes the performance of all versions of the content. It is another primary reason for duplicate content is considered bad for SEO.

Next, search engines will have trouble and hassle in consolidating the link metrics such as relevancy and authority for the content. It is especially true when other sites link to more than one version of the specific content. Likewise, you will find many reasons for duplicate content is terrible for SEO.

Remember that duplicate content can cause severe SEO problems and even send conflicting signals to the search engines. If you fail to take the right measure at the right time, your site will suffer a lot. Try to ensure your content has unique URLs, and thus every page obtains a greater chance to rank well and get more traffic to the website.

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Harms That Duplicate Content Cause

If you intentionally create duplicate content, it does not cause any harm. However, you should find which content version is original because that version will get an index. Typically, internal content duplication can cause search engines like Google to link to the wrong page on the website.

With the help of complex algorithms, the search engines determine which pages to index and which pages will return for the given keyword. The complete analysis will collapse when the website comprises several pages with similar boilerplate text and metadata or a repetitive or complex site structure.

Read More: What is Content Syndication Service?

If Google encounters a web page with duplicate content, it will choose some page to the index, but it will not be the one you wish to index. So, it creates a problem in getting your website/web page index. In addition, your site will not get more traffic and not reach the top of the result page.

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Is It Possible To Get A Penalty For Duplicate Content?

As said earlier, you will not get any penalty from Google as long as you did not copy someone else content intentionally. However, having duplicate content will hurt your SEO performance effectively. So, avoid accessing duplicate content and check whether your site often has such content in the safer zone.

Keep in mind that copying a large amount of content from others’ webpage make puts you at the risk of a fine line. Be careful and take the necessary steps to write and publish the original and plagiarism content on your site. If you cannot perform grounding action, leave the task to the experts. SEO professionals will handle the problem well and get your site to the top of the search result.

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What Are The Major Duplicate Content Issues?

In many cases, site owners do not know the significant duplicate content problems. Thus, they are unable to find potential fixes. So, here are the vital duplicate content issues.

1. Printer-friendly versions of the pages
2. Faceted or filtered navigation
3. Tracking parameters
4. Session IDs
5. Case-sensitive URLs
6. HTTP vs. HTTPS
7. Tag and category pages
8. Scrapers and content syndication
9. Comment pagination
10. Order of parameters

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A Common Fix for the Duplicate Content

Are you thinking about how to sort out the issue of duplicate content? Well, you can do the following mentioned measures carefully. Remember that there is no one-fit approach to duplicate content. You must select the weapon wisely to battle duplicate content carefully.

1. Implementing the 301 is the best and most effective way to fix the duplicate content. It redirects the non-preferred URLs (web pages/sites) to the preferred versions. If you wish that your URLs remain accessible to visitors, avoid redirecting. Instead, access the canonical URL or no-index redirected.
2. Try to link your site’s URL to the canonical versions. For instance, select which is canonical when you have a page with both desktop and mobile versions. After that, point all the internal links to the specific page only. Whenever building external links to that URL, you should ensure that all the content must go to the canonical link. It will help send clear signals to the crawlers about which URK to appear in SERPs.
3. Stop spammy scraper websites from taking credit for your content by accessing the self-referential canonical link on your website. Whenever any site copies the URLs content, Google will find your page as the ultimate source to index.
4. Ensure you have syndicated content on the appropriate sites because legitimate location plays a vital role in fixing the duplicate content. Moreover, you should ensure that all your content is fresh and original. Check that your content has not been duplicated on any sites. Spend time and examine all the tags and content to avoid duplication issues.

Contact us to craft and implement the SEO strategy to attract the targeted audiences.

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