Leaving your content unchecked can seriously risk the quality of your website!
Whether the duplicate content was placed on your website by accident, or someone took your content and used it for their profit, you have to keep up and make it right again.
All websites are vulnerable to the threat posed by duplicate content to your SEO friendly website campaign, even if you’re a small business or a big corporation.
So, let’s try to identify the duplicate material and check if it’s harming the performance of your website and other domains.
What is duplicate content?
The term duplicate content refers to pieces of content that are identical or substantially similar to one another (these are called near-duplicates). The term “near-duplicate material” refers to two blocks of content that differ only slightly. But keep in mind that having similar information is quite natural and can be inevitable in many situations, especially when there are a lot of articles around the same subject.
There are two kinds of duplicate content. The first one is internal duplicate content and it occurs when a single domain creates duplicate material by using multiple internal URLs of the same site. The second form is external duplicate content, sometimes known as cross-domain duplication. It happens when two or more domains have the same copy to be indexed by search engines.
How to Check for duplicate content?
If you know that your website has great content but it’s going down in rankings then SEO services can figure out if your content is getting copied and used elsewhere.
Other methods of testing include using an online tool called Copyscape to verify duplicate content, or simply performing an exact match search in which you pick a few lines from the text and search for them on Google to see if there are any copies.
What’s the connection between Duplicate content and SEO?
Officially, Google does not impose a penalty on this type of content, but it filters identical content, which has the same impact on the website as a penalty. Furthermore, the issue with duplicate content is that it confuses Google and causes it to pick between identical pages for ranking in Google’s eyes.
Unfortunately for businesses, your original content may not get selected for ranking in the SERPs but the duplicate content. This is one of the reasons why duplicate content is one of the SEO mistakes to avoid, in the future you can try to work with an SEO consultant to help you find ways to stay away from it so you wouldn’t have to worry about any more pesky duplicate content!
Which are the main On-page elements?
To avoid duplicate content issues, make sure that each page on your website has a distinct Meta description and page title within the HTML code. You must use headings such as h1, h2, and h3 that differ from those on other pages of the site.
Although the Meta description, title, and headings make up a little amount of information on your website, it is safer to keep your website as far away from the grey area of duplicate content as possible.
Duplicate Content and Product descriptions
One of the toughest marketing businesses to create original content for is obviously e-commerce. They have so many similar products that make it incredibly difficult to come up with unique descriptions for each of them! Take the time to do proper research into content creation and SEO for your business to rank higher.
What is Scraped content?
Scraped material happens when one of the website owners takes content from another site in order to improve the organic visibility of his own website. These webmasters try to get the machines to rewrite the scraped content they have stolen from other sites.
It is sometimes easy to detect scraped content since the thieves frequently do not bother to change branded terms in the content. If you are caught attempting to manipulate the Google search index, your website will be ranked much lower or perhaps eliminated from the search results.
Final Words
We’ve mentioned some of the main things you can do to prevent this kind of content from happening, but keep in mind that it is also important to avoid unintentional duplications since this also could lead to a penalty from Google and maybe even make them penalize all of your other posts as well.
SEO can be challenging, but it’s important if you want your content to rank on the first page of Google. To stay ahead in this game with search engine rankings:
1) Make sure every word was written by yourself instead of just copying and pasting text from other sources without adding anything new
2 ) Try to use original keywords so that relevant information will show up when people look for it
You can avoid being penalized by Google if you have a strong SEO plan in place, as Google’s algorithm is constantly updated to detect spammy websites.
