What is duplicate content?
The content which appear more than one place or present in more than one website address is known as Duplicate content so, if the same content appears at more than one web address, you’ve got duplicate content.
Duplicate Content also effect website ranking on search engine. When there are multiple pieces of, as Google calls it, “appreciably similar” content in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more appropriate to a given search query.
Why does duplicate content matter?
- For search engines
Duplicate content can present three main issues for search engines:
- They don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices.
- They don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
- They don't know which version(s) to rank for query results.
- For site owners
When duplicate content is present, site owners can suffer rankings and traffic losses. This may effect your website in two ways.
- To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, and thus are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the best result. This dilutes the visibility of each of the duplicates.
- Link equity can be further diluted because other sites have to choose between the duplicates as well. instead of all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, they link to multiple pieces, spreading the link equity among the duplicates. Because inbound links are a ranking factor, this can then impact the search visibility of a piece of content.
Duplicate content can create a lot of problems for search engines, and so for the best search engine optimization (SEO) results, you should remove it from your Website.
Content on the Web and on your own site can become duplicated either intentionally or by accident. Whatever the copycat’s motivation is, you don’t want people copying your original content if you can help it.
While not technically a penalty, duplicate content can still sometimes impact search engine rankings.
When there are multiple pieces of, as Google calls it, “appreciably similar” con-tent in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.
If you’re not careful, you could be inadvertently publishing duplicate content a few different ways:
- Multiple URLs pointing to the same content
- Multilingual versions of the same page
- Paginated content
If you want to check your domain for duplicate content, you can use this tool to do so.
Here are few more tips that will help you reduce content duplication on the do-mains that you administrate:
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Use 301's: If you've restructured your site, use 301 redirects "Redirect Permanent" in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)
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Be Consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent.
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Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country specific content. We're more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.
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Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
- Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.
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