The search engines do not appreciate anything that is not original. Google loves all that is organic and indexes the best suitable material for the users to visit, read, and use as per its quality and originality.
Google does not directly impose a penalty for duplicate content but does filters identical content. The results come as same as a penalty with a loss of web rankings for the web pages and reduced SEO importance.
Duplicate content is one that appears in more than one place or other than that unique website address where it is initially posted. So, when the same content appears at more than one web address, it impacts the search engine rankings. Appreciably similar content makes it difficult for the search engines to decide which version of the content is more relevant to a given search query.
Some of the quick problems that happen due to duplicate content issues:
· Loss of web ranking of a website
· Loss of relevant traffic to the site due to loss of ranking
· Loss of SEO values with lack of relevancy and popularity
How do duplicate content issues happen?
In the majority of cases, web owners do not intentionally create duplicate content. It may happen due to the following reasons:
#1. URL Variations: Some of the URL parameters can lead to creating duplicate content of a website like:
· Click tracking
· Analytics code
· Session IDs
· Printer-friendly versions of the content
Hence, it is always beneficial to avoid adding URL parameters or alternative versions of URLs. Instead, the information such parameters or versions contain can usually be passed through scripts.
#2. WWW vs. non-WWW pages or HTTP vs. HTTPS: If your website runs in both the versions of WWW & non-WWW and HTTP & HTTPS and both the versions are live and visible to the search engines, you will definitely face the duplicate content issue.
#3. Copied or Scraped Content: Product information pages are also consequential types of content similar to blog posts or editorial content. The same product information remains available at many ecommerce websites that are selling the same products, as they use the manufacturer’s descriptions of those items. Hence, it creates the possibility of identical content at multiple locations across the web.
How to fix duplicate content issues?
Fixing duplicate content issues come to the only idea of specifying which of the duplicates the correct one is. Whenever content is found similar to many other URLs, it needs to be canonicalized for search engines. There are three ways to do this:
1. 301 redirect: Setting up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original content page will not just combine all duplicate pages that have the potential to rank well into a single page but also stop them from completing with one another. This will boost the correct page’s ability to rank higher.
2. Rel=‘canonical’: Using the rel=’canonical’ attribute informs the search engines that a given page should be taken as a copy of a specified URL, and it should be credited with all of the links, content metrics, and ‘ranking power’ applied to that page.
3. Meta Robots Noindex: Meta robots is a meta tag that can help deal with duplicate content with the values “noindex, follow” that can be added to the HTML head of each page that should be excluded from a search engine’s index.
Domain and Parameter Handling in Google Search Console.
Using the Google Search Console feature, you can set the preferred domain of your website along with specifying whether Googlebot should crawl various URL parameters differently.
Whatever the URL structure of your site and cause of your duplicate content issues is, it would always be better to either set up your preferred domain or parameter handling tool or both.
Additional Methods to Deal with Duplicate Content
#1. Maintaining consistency when linking a website throughout internally. For example, if you have determined that Example Domain is the canonical version of your website, then all the internal links would go to example.co rather than Example Domain
#2. When you are opting for content syndication, make sure that you have added a link back to the syndicating website referring to the original content and not a variation on the URL.
#3. To have an extra safety against the content scrapers stealing your SEO credit, you should add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages. This canonical attribute points to the URL it is already on to demolish the efforts from the scrapers.
The search engines do not appreciate anything that is not original. Google loves all that is organic and indexes the best suitable material for the users to visit, read, and use as per its quality and originality.
Google does not directly impose a penalty for duplicate content but does filters identical content. The results come as same as a penalty with a loss of web rankings for the web pages and reduced SEO importance.
Duplicate content is one that appears in more than one place or other than that unique website address where it is initially posted. So, when the same content appears at more than one web address, it impacts the search engine rankings. Appreciably similar content makes it difficult for the search engines to decide which version of the content is more relevant to a given search query.
Some of the quick problems that happen due to duplicate content issues:
· Loss of web ranking of a website
· Loss of relevant traffic to the site due to loss of ranking
· Loss of SEO values with lack of relevancy and popularity
How do duplicate content issues happen?
In the majority of cases, web owners do not intentionally create duplicate content. It may happen due to the following reasons:
#1. URL Variations: Some of the URL parameters can lead to creating duplicate content of a website like:
· Click tracking
· Analytics code
· Session IDs
· Printer-friendly versions of the content
Hence, it is always beneficial to avoid adding URL parameters or alternative versions of URLs. Instead, the information such parameters or versions contain can usually be passed through scripts.
#2. WWW vs. non-WWW pages or HTTP vs. HTTPS: If your website runs in both the versions of WWW & non-WWW and HTTP & HTTPS and both the versions are live and visible to the search engines, you will definitely face the duplicate content issue.
#3. Copied or Scraped Content: Product information pages are also consequential types of content similar to blog posts or editorial content. The same product information remains available at many ecommerce websites that are selling the same products, as they use the manufacturer’s descriptions of those items. Hence, it creates the possibility of identical content at multiple locations across the web.
How to fix duplicate content issues?
Fixing duplicate content issues come to the only idea of specifying which of the duplicates the correct one is. Whenever content is found similar to many other URLs, it needs to be canonicalized for search engines. There are three ways to do this:
1. 301 redirect: Setting up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original content page will not just combine all duplicate pages that have the potential to rank well into a single page but also stop them from completing with one another. This will boost the correct page’s ability to rank higher.
2. Rel=‘canonical’: Using the rel=’canonical’ attribute informs the search engines that a given page should be taken as a copy of a specified URL, and it should be credited with all of the links, content metrics, and ‘ranking power’ applied to that page.
3. Meta Robots Noindex: Meta robots is a meta tag that can help deal with duplicate content with the values “noindex, follow” that can be added to the HTML head of each page that should be excluded from a search engine’s index.
Domain and Parameter Handling in Google Search Console.
Using the Google Search Console feature, you can set the preferred domain of your website along with specifying whether Googlebot should crawl various URL parameters differently.
Whatever the URL structure of your site and cause of your duplicate content issues is, it would always be better to either set up your preferred domain or parameter handling tool or both.
Additional Methods to Deal with Duplicate Content
#1. Maintaining consistency when linking a website throughout internally. For example, if you have determined that Example Domain is the canonical version of your website, then all the internal links would go to example.co rather than Example Domain
#2. When you are opting for content syndication, make sure that you have added a link back to the syndicating website referring to the original content and not a variation on the URL.
#3. To have an extra safety against the content scrapers stealing your SEO credit, you should add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages. This canonical attribute points to the URL it is already on to demolish the efforts from the scrapers.
The search engines do not appreciate anything that is not original. Google loves all that is organic and indexes the best suitable material for the users to visit, read, and use as per its quality and originality.
Google does not directly impose a penalty for duplicate content but does filters identical content. The results come as same as a penalty with a loss of web rankings for the web pages and reduced SEO importance.
Duplicate content is one that appears in more than one place or other than that unique website address where it is initially posted. So, when the same content appears at more than one web address, it impacts the search engine rankings. Appreciably similar content makes it difficult for the search engines to decide which version of the content is more relevant to a given search query.
Some of the quick problems that happen due to duplicate content issues:
· Loss of web ranking of a website
· Loss of relevant traffic to the site due to loss of ranking
· Loss of SEO values with lack of relevancy and popularity
How do duplicate content issues happen?
In the majority of cases, web owners do not intentionally create duplicate content. It may happen due to the following reasons:
#1. URL Variations: Some of the URL parameters can lead to creating duplicate content of a website like:
· Click tracking
· Analytics code
· Session IDs
· Printer-friendly versions of the content
Hence, it is always beneficial to avoid adding URL parameters or alternative versions of URLs. Instead, the information such parameters or versions contain can usually be passed through scripts.
#2. WWW vs. non-WWW pages or HTTP vs. HTTPS: If your website runs in both the versions of WWW & non-WWW and HTTP & HTTPS and both the versions are live and visible to the search engines, you will definitely face the duplicate content issue.
#3. Copied or Scraped Content: Product information pages are also consequential types of content similar to blog posts or editorial content. The same product information remains available at many ecommerce websites that are selling the same products, as they use the manufacturer’s descriptions of those items. Hence, it creates the possibility of identical content at multiple locations across the web.
How to fix duplicate content issues?
Fixing duplicate content issues come to the only idea of specifying which of the duplicates the correct one is. Whenever content is found similar to many other URLs, it needs to be canonicalized for search engines. There are three ways to do this:
1. 301 redirect: Setting up a 301 redirect from the duplicate page to the original content page will not just combine all duplicate pages that have the potential to rank well into a single page but also stop them from completing with one another. This will boost the correct page’s ability to rank higher.
2. Rel=‘canonical’: Using the rel=’canonical’ attribute informs the search engines that a given page should be taken as a copy of a specified URL, and it should be credited with all of the links, content metrics, and ‘ranking power’ applied to that page.
3. Meta Robots Noindex: Meta robots is a meta tag that can help deal with duplicate content with the values “noindex, follow” that can be added to the HTML head of each page that should be excluded from a search engine’s index.
Domain and Parameter Handling in Google Search Console.
Using the Google Search Console feature, you can set the preferred domain of your website along with specifying whether Googlebot should crawl various URL parameters differently.
Whatever the URL structure of your site and cause of your duplicate content issues is, it would always be better to either set up your preferred domain or parameter handling tool or both.
Additional Methods to Deal with Duplicate Content
#1. Maintaining consistency when linking a website throughout internally. For example, if you have determined that Example Domain is the canonical version of your website, then all the internal links would go to example.co rather than Example Domain
#2. When you are opting for content syndication, make sure that you have added a link back to the syndicating website referring to the original content and not a variation on the URL.
#3. To have an extra safety against the content scrapers stealing your SEO credit, you should add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages. This canonical attribute points to the URL it is already on to demolish the efforts from the scrapers.
