Have you ever encountered a situation in which the content of another website looks similar to what is published on your website? Well, if that is the case, then the chances of penalties coming from Google and other search engines to your website can be higher.
This will further result in lower visibility and rankings on search engines, which sounds really bad for your online presence. What’s worse is the loss of trust and credibility you’ve built with your audience over time.
In this article, you will explore multiple ways to deal with duplicate content issues that are hampering your SEO in Austin and other regions. Through these tips, you will be able to improve the SEO of your website with due effect.
What Exactly is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is something that is potentially similar or identical to more than one URL present on the internet. This is a major issue that can influence the visibility and rankings of one or more pages from your website.
This issue is something that can occur to any website or across multiple websites. If you need to recognize duplicacy issues, you should look out for:
- Noticeable overlap in structure, words, and format with the content present on the other website.
- Information that doesn’t seem to be original at all.
- Minimal or zero value for a user as compared to the other page.
How Does Duplicate Content Impact Your Website?
Duplicate content can definitely have a negative influence on your search engine rankings and visibility. It doesn’t even matter whether duplication was carried out on an internal or external level.
Internal duplication can further cause your pages to cannibalize the ranking potential of the other pages on your website.
At the same time, external duplication can cause the other website to rank well instead of the content that was originally written by your team. Some other issues that you may end up facing with duplicate content include:
Diluted Power of Backlinks:
Backlinks are the links on other websites that will take the user from that site to your website. These links go through the ranking power of your page. If your pages have content identical to the websites through which you are earning backlinks, you will end up splitting your own ranking power instead of focusing on one main URL.
Wasted Crawl Budget:
Search engines don’t have unlimited time and resources(also known as “Crawl budget”) to crawl and examine your site. When they are crawling multiple versions of identical content, they won’t be able to crawl and index pages that are far more important.
This can be more problematic if your website is quite comprehensive.
Notably, Google doesn’t usually issue a manual penalty for duplicate content till the time it becomes completely manipulative and is used at a large scale. Still, it can have a negative impact on your website’s SEO performance.
Common Issues That Result in Duplicate Content
Here are some common issues that can result in copylifted content, as given below:
URL Parameters:
Every time your website includes parameters in a URL, it will end up developing multiple URLs that involve similar core content.
Domain Name Variations:
Your content can be accessible through various versions of your domain, including the HTTP and HTTPS versions of your site, along with various different ways. This is why a single page can exist at different locations.
Scrapped or Syndicated Content:
If other websites are publishing your content again and again, with or without your permission, it will end up creating duplicate versions on multiple domains.
Pagination:
If you are splitting content across different pages, every page will have identical content. Furthermore, such content will be found in different URLs.
Things to Consider While Dealing With Copylifted Content Issues
Here are some things you can consider while dealing with issues with respect to duplicate content:
Consider Executing 301 Redirects:
One of the right ways to deal with the issues regarding duplicate content on your own site is to implement a 301 redirect. By doing so, you will be able to shift one URL to the other. This strategy is actually effective for duplicates that are redundant for your website.
Above all else, different hosting providers and content delivery networks offer the easiest ways to set up 301 redirects.
Implement Canonical Tags:
A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML. It describes the main URL for your content that is copied or heavily identical. This will help you ensure the indexing of the important versions. By doing so, search engines will be able to consolidate the power of backlinks to that version.
Utilize Noindex Tag:
This is an HTML directive that will inform search engines to avoid including a specific page in their index. This further implies that this specific page won’t show up in search engine results.
This kind of approach will help you deal with content that is either scraped or syndicated. This is extremely helpful when your content is getting published on other websites with your permission.
In similar situations, you need to ask publishers to implement a noindex tag to the syndicated versions. This will help you ensure that your content is the only one that shows up on search engine results.
Furthermore, you need to strive to make your webpage unique. You can do so by differentiating your content, which is possible by:
- Applying fresh perspectives and insights while rewriting the content.
- Showcase practical examples and actionable tips that can be helpful for your readers.
- Add expert quotes, original research, and data that will help you support your points.
- You can even use SEO writing assistants to identify any text you might have inadvertently used to make your content look original.
To Summarize
Copied or duplicate content can be a really distressful thing that can weaken the SEO performance of your website. It can further lower your rankings and visibility on SERPs. To avoid such things, you can implement the above mentioned tips, which will allow you to avoid penalties and loss of rankings and visibility on your website.
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