SEO: Your Ultimate Guide to Understand, Avoid and Check Duplicate Content

Nowadays, most business organizations try to capture the online market. It is a very effective way to get more customers than the physical one. Online business marketing plays a key role, and for that reason, business websites and blogs are receiving much importance.

Since, in the case of online business, the customers and potential customers don’t get a chance to have a physical meeting, many may question the company’s credibility. For that reason, the companies must have a well-constructed and plagiarism-free website.

Even the blog contents must not have any duplicate content. If a reader finds the same content, that can harm the impression of the organization. Thus, the writers engaged in content creation on behalf of the company must check duplicate content before putting the article on their website.

The way having duplicate content can directly impact a company’s image can also indirectly affect the company. Duplicate content, SEO are intricately related in the case of a website. Suppose a website has identical content on its website. In that case, that can decrease the SEO ranking of the company.

Hence, the traffic to the page also decreases, which affects the business of the organization. Therefore, companies and organizations must avoid having duplicate contents. If the company has its writer and content developer team, they must check duplicate content on their website.

If the organizations hire freelance writers for the content, they must ensure that the content is not plagiarised. For that, they can check for plagiarism using a Website plagiarism checker.

What Is Duplicate Content?

It may happen that a particular article is appearing in more than one place on the internet. The site is referred to as a location with a unique website address or URL. In brief, if content exists at more than one web address, then it is called duplicate content.

There can be different reasons for the creation of duplicate content. Though it can be both technical and manual, the result is the same in both cases. The presence of duplicate content affects the SEO ranking on a website. For that reason, the writers and content creators must always use a duplicate content checker to check for duplicate content.

For duplicate content, the content may be present in a particular website for more than one location. It may also happen that the reader can reach a specific article in several ways. There can be content that is available under two different categories and sections of the website.

How Does Duplicate Content Impact SEO?

Duplicate content can harm the SEO ranking of the website of an organization. For different reasons, the website of an organization has the same content twice on their website. It may also happen that a website is using the content of another website as a part of its scrapped content. In both cases, the website may suffer from SEO issues.

The search engines like Google try to improve user experience by removing duplicate content. Though they do not give any penalty for duplicating content, they can lower SEO ranking to the website. As a result, the website may not appear on the top of the search results. It can decrease the traffic to the website.

Higher SEO rankings help to bring more organic traffic than the organization can nurture to convert them to lead. Thus, a company gets a lower SEO ranking, leading to a decrease in traffic, which may eventually decrease sales and business.

What Are the Reasons for Duplicate Content Creation?

There are different ways behind the creation of duplicate content. It may also happen that the website owner himself creates similar content accidentally by mistake. The reasons for the creation of the duplicate content issues are –

• If any website has several web page addresses with different variations like HTTP//: HTTPS//: www, with the same content, then duplicate content issues may arise. It also means that the website has some duplicate pages.

• Many websites try to create bulky articles by using scraped content. The sites may also do it by republishing the same article, blog, or editorial they previously published. In the case of e-commerce, website developers often use manufacturer details and product details as scraped contents.
• It may also happen that specific content has two different unique locations or URLs. There are various parameters like click tracking and analytics code, which can lead to duplicate contents.

Therefore, one can accidentally create duplicate content anytime. For that reason, the website owners must check duplicate content in their website so that it cannot get harmed by the content checker.

Best Ways to Avoid Duplicate Content?

There are different effective ways to avoid duplicate content. For example,

• The website developer can use a 301redircet tag on the pages with duplicate content to deliver the readers to the original landing page. They can also use the .htaccess file for this.
• The web-developer can also take a rel=”canonical” Tag for the same purpose. Therefore, they can tell the search engine that the URL is the particular content’s original or actual source. This Meta tag as a part of the HTML head of the webpage indicates that the search engines should add all the links to the particular website that is canonized.
• A website can also take parts from another web site’s content and use it as a scrapping tool. To avoid getting affected by this, the actual owner of a website or content may get a Google authorship, which helps the owner stay away from plagiarism. The owner can sign their name to a penned content.
• The website owner can also adjust the parameters and preferred domain. The search engines like Google can get to know from this about the owner’s actual web page competing for the ranking.

Find Duplicate Content on Your Site:

It is essential to know how to check for duplicate content to avoid similar content. The website owners can also use a duplicate content checker to check duplicate content present on their website from time to time.

The duplicate content checker tool scans and compares the content with the website’s existing content and generates a detailed result. They find out the links to the copied content. The web developers can work accordingly to avoid the duplicate content present on their website.