You already know that good SEO practices are highly important to your overall business. And, if youre here, you are trying to solve some of the duplicate content issues in your website.
You already know that good SEO practices are highly important to your overall business. And, if youre here, you are trying to solve some of the duplicate content issues in your website.
Duplicate content is content found in more than one place on the internet that is the same or appreciably similar, as Google puts it. Duplicate content is a problem for search engines because it makes it difficult for them to decide the most relevant version for the particular search.
Although not technically a penalty, duplicate content issues will negatively impact your search engine rankings. This is especially true when dealing with large amounts of duplicate pages.
Lets explore why duplicate content can occur, some best practices, and how to fix the most common duplicate content issues.
Despite your best efforts during your keyword research and content planning, 29% of the web is duplicate content. Most of the time, youre not creating duplicate content on purpose. But it happens.
A report from AHREFS shows duplicate content issues:
The most common ways duplicate content gets created are:
URL variations can be introduced by analytics and other click tracking code, causing duplicate content problems.
If your site assigns session IDs to each visitor or you happen to have printer-friendly versions of some content, make sure you do this through scripts in order to avoid duplicate content issues.
When you have various live versions of your website, it will definitely cause duplicate content problems.
Product information and descriptions, product pages, are often one of the main sources of duplicate content for eCommerce sites. But, scrapers that republish your content are quite common as another source of duplicate content.
Every SEO guide for beginners or experts will tell you that search engines do not like duplicate content. Users also dont enjoy duplicate content that much. That should be enough for you to go ahead and fix your duplicate content issues.
There are three main issues you could potentially face if your website has too much duplicate content.
Obvious. If Google and other search engines are having problems figuring out your duplicate content issues, your rankings are going to suffer, thus your traffic too.
If Google struggles to rank a few different pages with duplicate content, all of them will struggle to rank.
Although extremely rare, Google has said that duplicate content is grounds for penalties or even complete deindexing of a website. Most of the time when this happens its because of content scraping or copying.
If your website has lots of duplicate pages, Google might just run out of crawl budget and decide to just not index the pages at all. This issue is most commonly found on eCommerce sites.
Making sure you take care of your duplicate content issues will definitely help you with your rankings and also improve your domain authority.
Product pages for eCommerce sites are the most common place where duplicate content gets created. Try setting everything up through scripts in order to have every different version of your product under the same URL.
Checking your indexed pages is as easy as performing a search on Google. Just type site:yoursite.com in Google. Also, you can go to Google Search Console and consult your indexed pages.
The idea is that the number you find through either of these methods should be the same as the number of pages you created manually on your website. If you see exorbitant numbers that dont make sense, youll know those pages are duplicate content.
We already talked about different versions of your site causing duplicate content problems. Making sure you redirect all those different versions to the right one will ensure proper redirections.
If deleting duplicate pages is not an option, 301 redirects are a really easy way to fix duplicate content issues on your website. The tip is to redirect all duplicate content pages back to the original. This way, search engines will only index the original content, helping the original page to rank better.
Using the rel=canonical tag is another easy solution for duplicate content issues. What this tag does is tell Google and other search engines which page is the original among the rest so the duplicates are ignored and only the original is indexed.
Canonical tags can easily be done without help from your developer and are actually preferred by Google over blocking pages with duplicate content.
Duplicate content is not necessarily identical content. We already discussed Googles definition of duplicate includes appreciable similar content. This is usually not an issue for most websites. But, if youre serious about ranking and awesome content, plan to write 100% unique content for every one of your pages.
There are various tools out there to help you find duplicate content. These tools will scan (crawl) your website and produce a report with the pages that have duplicate content. Siteliner, SEMrush, AHREFS are a couple of examples of tools you could use.
This is a screenshot of MOZpro showing duplicate content issues:
There might be cases where you have pages with very similar content that can be consolidated into one awesome page with lots of valuable information.
Lets say you have three different pages dealing with the same topic but from a different angle. For example:
You could create one page with all the content, for example:
After removing the duplicate content and redirecting all URLs to the new super page, it should rank better than the old ones.
WordPress automatically generates tag and category pages. Add a noindex tag to these pages so that they can continue to exist and be useful to your users, but dont get indexed by search engines.
Alternatively, set up your WordPress so these pages are not generated at all.
This meta robots tag can be added to your pages HTML head to exclude it from a search engines index. The Meta Noindex, Follow tag allows search engines to crawl the links on a page but doesnt include them in the indices.
Remember that search engines want to see everything in order to catch errors and other issues in your code, so let them crawl these pages but add the Noindex tag.
Duplicate content is relatively easy to fix and handle, but it can also get out of control if you dont keep an eye on it. Make sure to follow the guidelines above and:
Continue to learn more with Outreach Frog and take your SEO to the next level. Clich, yes, but true.
