Your instructors most likely drilled into you the dangers of copying while you were in school. You and your fellow friend would also receive a failing grade if you sent in an essay with paragraphs of similar text.
Given how long this mentality has been instilled in people, it is no wonder that many of us regard duplicate material in the same light. If you don’t understand what it means, making your web content match text found at a different URL can be frightening.
But what exactly is duplicate content, and how does it affect your online marketing strategy? We will go over each of those questions in detail below, so keep reading for more information.
What is duplicate content?
Google uses the word ‘duplicate content’ to describe large chunks of content that appear on multiple URLs. Duplicate content may refer to a wide variety of things; sometimes, it is entire pages, and other times it is just a few similar sentences.
It is important to remember that duplication of material is not just limited to word-for-word duplicates. You can copy content from one URL to another and then substitute synonyms for some of the terms, but Google will also detect the similarity.
What causes duplicate content?
Although duplicate content can conjure up images of malicious duplication or plagiarism. The majority of duplicated content is harmless and unintentional. The following are some of the most common reasons:
URL variations: When the site uses session IDs, it generates a different version of the URL for each user that could be a single URL that ends up being multiple URLs.
Versions of the site that are not the one you are looking for: You can end up with duplicate pages if you create a new website on a different domain or create an HTTPs version to replace the original HTTP version. HTTP to HTTPs redirect can be verified for issues with our SEO checker!
Pure serendipity: It is possible to write redundant content without realizing it now and then. If you and another website write about the same subject, you can end up writing a passage that is similar enough to be considered duplicate material.
Scraped content: When you write scrape content from one URL to another. You are simply copying it! It can happen without malice, such as when two pages use a similar big quote from the same source.
Duplicate content, though typically unintended, can have a measurable impact on your online marketing, as we will see.
If you believe duplicate material can hurt your SEO, then you are right — but maybe not in the way you expect. Continue reading to learn more about the connection between duplicate content and SEO!
“Be yourself; no one can do a better job at being you.”
Is there any penalty for duplicating content?
One of the most common misconceptions about duplicate content is that having duplicate content on your site would result in a direct penalty from Google. Is this, however, correct?
In a nutshell, no.
Google has tried to explain — to varying degrees of success — that duplicate content is not explicitly penalized in rankings. Google recognizes that duplicated content will inevitably occur and that it is usually unintentional.
There is one notable exception, however: material that has been copied from word to word.
How does duplicate content impact your SEO?
Copied content is a type of duplicate content, namely the small percentage of duplicate content that is done on purpose — and with deception. Content that deliberately plagiarised or attempts to manipulate search results is referred to as cloned content.
When Google detects misleading intent in duplicate content, it will penalize the perpetrator by lowering their rating or even deleting them from Google’s index entirely.
However, since most duplicate content does not count as copied content.
a) If at all possible, avoid duplicating content.
The most straightforward way to prevent duplicate content problems is to avoid getting duplicate content in the first place. You will not always be in complete charge of this, but you can always strive to reduce it.
If you find that a product page is generating multiple URLs for the same pants in different sizes, for example, you can work to merge those URLs into one. That means the content will only appear on one page, not two, and there will be no duplicate content.
You could end up with situations where each combination of the different “length” and “waist” buttons in the above image generates a different URL if you don’t fix those issues!
b) Make use of redirects
Duplicate content is often an unavoidable result of a specific site update, such as moving from an HTTP to an HTTPs site. You can help Google prevent confusion in these cases by using 301 redirects.
A redirect works by sending a search engine to URL B instead of URL A as it wants to access URL A. You may use a redirect to send all traffic to the preferred page if you have two URLs with duplicate content.
c) Use the rel=”canonical” attribute.
The rel=“canonical” attribute is a line of code that can be added to the HTML head of a document. It informs Google that the page is on the copy of another page and that the other page should be treated as the original.
If you have a PDF version of a page, on your blog, for example, this is a good practice. You want the original HTML version of the page to rate, but Google might be confused with the duplicated material. As a result, you add the rel=“canonical” attribute to the PDF page to inform Google that it is not the original.
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