What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content refers to identical content found at different URLs. Many websites have multiple URLs that contain the same content.
Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?
Duplicate content hurts your search engine ranking because it confuses search engines. When the search engine sees two pages with the same content, they don’t know which one to include in query results. This dilutes the ranking power of each duplicate page, including the original one that you want to be found.
How does duplicate content happen?
There are a number of causes for duplicate content. One of the most common is causes is different URL variations. Click tracking URL parameters and session IDs assign each user a different ID which gets added to the URL. Search engines read each of these unique URLs and see it as duplicate content.
Another cause for duplicate content is including “printer friendly” versions of pages on your website. Basically, anytime there are alternate URLs for one page, it’s lowering the search ranking for that page.
Sometimes other people’s websites will have the same content as yours. This could be for a variety of reasons. For one, they may have purposely stolen content (like an article or blog post) from your website. If you purchased a website that came with generic content and you didn’t change it, there are probably other duplicates on the web. For e-commerce businesses, if you use a generic factory product description, there will be duplicates on other websites that sell the same products.
How do I identify duplicate content on my website?
The best way to identify duplicate content on your website is to use the tool Google Search Console. When you log in, look under “Search Appearance” and click “HTML Improvements”. This will show you URLs throughout your website that contain duplicate meta descriptions and title tags.
How can I fix duplicate content that I can’t avoid on my website?
Select the page that you want to be the original; this is called the “canonical URL”. There are two practical ways of showing search engines which is the original.
The first is to redirect all duplicate pages to the canonical URL using a 301 redirect.
The second is to add the “rel=canonical” attribute into the html code of each duplicate page. This additional code specifies the URL of the original page, which tells search engines to disregard the duplicates. The standard format for adding this onto a page is:
<head>
<link href=”URL OF ORIGINAL PAGE” rel=”canonical” />
</head>
Note: There may be other code in your header besides the rel=canonical attribute.
Duplicate content is a common issue that many business owners don’t know is negatively impacting their search rankings. We encourage you to share this article with your web developer to make sure that your website isn’t losing visibility due to duplicate content!
