Duplicate content: Why and How to Avoid It

Avoid plagiarism with a duplicate content checker tool

Duplicate content check of website content is vital because duplicate content creates problems for the website by negatively impacting website ranking in the virtual domain. Unique content is highly appreciated in the virtual platform as it helps to keep the audience engaged.

Thus, it is imperative to create original content. However, duplicate content often forms surreptitiously, where different web addresses are created for the same site or webpage.

Well, this confuses the search parameters as search engines find the same result replicated in multiple pages. Hence, to prevent such problems, it is essential to check the website for internal duplicate content that has formed due to the replication of webpages. The process that allows users to view relevant results for a particular query on the internet depends on the search engine’s search algorithm. Users browse for information on the internet through a particular search engine.

The search engine scans the internet for information that matches the query of the user. The results that feature on the search engine results page show the websites, blogs, or social pages that correspond to the user’s search term.

But when the same information is present on multiple platforms, search engines choose to feature only one result. In many instances, the leading website fails to get featured in the results page and thereby loses traffic and gets a lower rank from search engines.

Hence, it is necessary to automate the scanning process for detecting all kinds of duplicate content. A content checker specifically designed to find duplicate content is highly useful for maintaining the integrity of website content.

The necessity of resolving duplicate content problems

Technical problems that cause websites to have different forms due to language changes or device adaptability results in duplicate versions.

These are problems that do not attract any penal action from search engines, but the traffic often gets directed to a non-preferred version, and the rank of the main website decreases.

The duplicates often waste the crawl budget of the website owner, and hence the rank also gets diluted. These technical issues require immediate solutions as the web site’s overall performance won’t be measurable until the preferred version is crawled.

Thus, to optimize website performance, it is sensible to eliminate all technical issues that dilute website ranking. Dealing with duplicate content, promptly, keeps the website optimized for providing optimum experience to users.

The performance of the website depends heavily on the quality of the user experience. A slow website with stale content doesn’t arrest the attention of visitors. A well-built website is bound to attract visitors, so a sudden decline in search volume must be adequately investigated.

In most cases, poor quality websites plagiarize content from well-designed sites. Scraping content often affects the website from where the content has been stolen as the website content figures as duplicate content, according to search engines.

Therefore, it is understandable that plagiarized content affects the reliability and position of a website in the results page. In case of content theft, it is vital to forward the complaint to appropriate forums that deal with these issues.

Steps to follow for avoiding content duplication

It is vital to check the website content for error pages and internal duplication of pages. The most common kinds of duplicate content are discussed below, along with solutions for solving those problems:

Internal duplicate pages:

The webpages within a website can get duplicated. It implies that the same page is present in multiple places within the website. It is purely a technical glitch and can be handled by either removing those pages or redirecting those pages to the main page that has got replicated.

It is vital to address this issue as the presence of multiple error-pages within a website can hamper user interaction. Using appropriate SEO tools helping in finding and addressing such problems swiftly.

Multiple functional website versions:

The secure version compared to the non-secure version can exist on the virtual platform, but it creates the problem of duplicate websites as the content is the same on both the versions.

The websites are also modified to enable a smooth browsing experience on different gadgets. It also leads to the same website versions.

Usually, selecting the preferred version for ranking on the search engine solves the ranking problem caused by duplicate content.

Different URL addresses:

User interaction with websites generates session ids that create a primary URL variant. Well, this leads to multiple URLs that point towards the same content, hence, giving rise to the problem of duplicate content.

Checking the website URLs for this problem helps in gauging the impact it can have on the website ranking.

Content re-published on other sites:

Syndication is a well-known method that allows bloggers and article writers to gain more views for their published articles. Inserting original credits of the article in the third-party websites is necessary. In this way, content syndication won’t affect ranking negatively.

Information on category pages:

Websites that deal with retail products need to have product descriptions. The description of products gets copied multiple times, giving rise to duplicate content.

Relatively new websites fail to feature in the results page due to the copied descriptions. To resolve the problem, forming unique descriptions is an excellent method.

Stolen duplicate content

This is the most annoying form of duplicate content as it involves the deliberate act of stealing content from websites. Content scrapers often take content from one or more websites to fill out their websites.

They cannot spin creative content and hence resort to such unethical measures. Plagiarism detection with a high-quality plagiarism checker helps determine places where website content has been used without permission.

Conclusion:

Therefore, to preserve the uniqueness of the content, it is essential to prevent duplication of information on the internet. Hence, using a duplicate content checker for content scanning is a prudent decision.