How To Deal With Duplicate Content Issues?
Looking to find out what duplicate content is, and the way it’d be hurting your SEO?
Duplicate content may be a source of constant anxiety for several site owners. Read almost anything about it, and you’ll come away believing that your site may be a ticking time bomb of duplicate content issues. A Google penalty is simply days away. Fortunately, this isn’t true but duplicate content can still affect your SEO negatively and with 25–30% of the online content being duplicate content, it’s useful to grasp a way to avoid and fix such issues. Here are some causes and solutions of duplicate content that can help you. But first, let us understand what duplicate content is.
What Is Duplicate Content?
The most obvious place to seek out duplicate content is on-page; however, repeated titles and meta descriptions also count as duplicate content and may be harder for search marketers to identify and fix without a replica content checker.
It’s easy to determine how this happens: generic product descriptions, boilerplate text, or brand messages are often repeated across domains and pages, without malicious intent. Search engines understand that duplicate content happens and hence don’t impose any penalty. If you think you are going through any penalty, you can go through our guide on how to identify and recover from Google Penalties.
Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?
Duplicate content may harm your SEO performance say the SEO professionals.
Repeated content presents a significant problem for search engines, which strive to drop duplicate content from their results. Meaning they need to form a split-second decision about which version of the content to feature.
Search engines typically consider the strength of the sites, review the timestamp on the content to verify which website posted its first, and weigh the length of the duplicated text against the quantity of content on the whole site. Ultimately, the positioning that ranks retains its spot on the SERP, but the pages with duplicate content won’t rank and lodge in a near-zero weight.
What varieties of Duplicate Content Are Harmful?
Not all duplicate content is bad, but some are, so it’s a controversy you ought to address. Google considers duplicate content harmful if it’s repeated across domains for the express purpose of manipulating search engines and attempting to extend page rank. Since this compromises search engines’ abilities to supply an honest user experience, Google typically punishes this behavior.
How to deal with Duplicate Content Issues?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to duplicate content. But there are common fixes that help tackle the foremost common problems and their consequences:
1: Printer-Friendly Versions of Pages
Printer-friendly websites are great in terms of user experience, even within the era of unlimited mobile data and voice assistants. But while they’re great for those who have to access paper documentation, they’ll generate duplicate content problems. Printer-friendly URLs create two distinct versions of the identical page; if both versions are indexable, crawlers will spend your crawl budget crawling both and may need to choose which one to indicate in SERPs.
Solution: employing a canonical tag will prevent printer-friendly and mobile page versions from becoming duplicate content issues. The canonical tag sets the most version of a page and sends all ranking signals to its main version.
To set up a rel=canonical URL, place a piece of code within the section of the page you wish to position as canonical, replacing the URL with the URL on your site that’s the first piece of content.
2: HTTP/HTTPS or Subdomain issues
Switching to HTTPS is definitely good for SEO and must be done surely. But sometimes this changeover can cause duplicate content issues as the crawlers see two identical versions of your website.
The same thing arises with versions of the identical site with and without the www. prefix. Bots must choose from versions of the positioning, expenditure crawls budget, and needlessly splitting link equity.
Solution: Setting a preferred domain in your site’s Search Console lets crawlers know which version of your domain they ought to target states the Internet Marketing Service experts. To line a preferred domain, move to the positioning Settings in Search Console, and choose the choice you would like within the Preferred Domain section.
Note: immediately this feature is just available within the old version of Search Console.
3: UTM Parameters and Session IDs
Using parameters to trace information and session IDs could be a great idea for accurate web marketing metrics. But search engines interpret each version as a distinct URL with duplicate content. Once again, the multiple versions will confuse crawlers and dilute ranking factors.
Solution: The rel=canonical tag allows you to line your preferred version of the URL. It guarantees that the proper URL gets crawled by bots, and receives all the SEO benefits led to by backlinks and site visits.
4: Pagination
Search engines can fail to acknowledge paginated pages and interpret them as duplicated content. There are different types of pagination issues that cause duplicate content — an example, gallery pagination, when every item during a gallery has its own page; and category pagination, when product listings span several pages. regardless of the technicalities of the matter, they will all end in duplicate content issues.
Solution: Pagination problems are often solved by using the rel=“prev” and rel=“next” tags. These tell crawlers the precise relationship between the component URLs of a pagination series.
5: Country/Language Versions of the identical Page
Sites often have country-specific domains with identical content on each. It’s possible that nearly all content on these sites is going to be duplicated, but webmasters still have to ensure that both appear in SERPs.
Solution: There are two options to assist guarantee each domain’s visibility: top-level domains and therefore the hreflang tag.
Top-level domains appear at the tip of a site name and include familiar forms like .com, .org, .edu, .net, .gov, likewise as country-level domains. Google recommends using these structures to clearly signal that content is serving different geographies.
The hreflang tag helps bots show users the right version of a site for their location. Adding the subsequent code to the section of your site will show users in Spain the Spanish version of your domain, for example, Crawlers won’t identify translated versions of a site as duplicate content, because of the halfling.
6: Copied Content
Spammy sites stealing your content could be a reality of life. Unfortunately, this type of activity can negatively affect the first site. That’s why you wish to act against copied content and protect your site’s authority.
Solution: First, try moving into touch with the offending site and asking them to get rid of the content suggest the experts from Jacksonville SEO Company. If they don’t, you’ll learn more here from Google on the way to report infringement.
Conclusion
If you’re an honest website owner with some technical website challenges, and you are not trying to trick Google, you should not worry about getting a penalty from Google.
But if not then know that copied content can lead to a Google penalty. Copied content happens when spammers scrape content from an artless source and put it on their own site. Duplicate content can throw a wrench into any website’s computer program optimization (SEO) strategy, which suggests your site suffers from poor rankings on computer program results pages (SERPs) and lost traffic. Be told what duplicate content is and the way you’ll tackle this problem. Like duplicate content, copied content leads to two sites with identical chunks of content; unlike duplicate content, however, copied content happens intentionally, fails to feature value to the reader, and infrequently involves a sub-quality website.
