Duplicate Content

January 11, 2023

How To Handle the Negative Impact of Duplicate content?

The online presence of a brand is nowadays responsible for controlling the revenue generation of the company. Since contents are still, the king of website optimization strategies, you should concentrate more on the content. However, when content is a copy of other content available on some other website, it can degrade your website. And don’t be surprised if Google algorithm blacklists your website for duplicating the content. so, it's time to know how the copied contents can harm the website and how to avoid a catastrophe.

⮚ What are duplicate contents?

According to SEO experts, Duplicate content is a text or a block of text from content that is an exact copy of the original content that is present on some other website. Content will be a duplicate even when the writer is paraphrasing, partially or fully, or spinning the original article. Needless to say, if your website steals content, the Google algorithm will not consider it a good parameter for ranking on the SERP. Some website owners post duplicated content intentionally aiming to get as good a ranking as the original content. but some websites may have posted content without even realizing that it is a duplicate version. Sometimes use of similar terms, phrases and similar concepts can show duplication in the contents. But Google bots won’t penalize the website for such content. Still, it will have a negative impact on the SERP. So, you have to be very cautious about avoiding duplicate write-ups on your website.

⮚ Why avoid duplicate content?

Contents can make or break your reputation on the digital platform. If the readers like the content, the viewers will stay on your page for a few minutes and check out the products or services seven if they don’t buy on the first visit. And equal harm is possible when a visitor is on yoru website, only to find a re-writing of a blog that is trending nowadays. Thus, duplicate content will always cause problems with search engine rankings. Some other problems include

Dilution of the link equity
Non-availability of your important web pages on the SERP owing to the copied contents
Issues with indexing as crawlers can detect duplication.
Negative impact on the core site metrics including the rank position on the SERPs and traffic
Compromise in domain authority.

Search engines always reward the websites that post unique content by tagging them at higher ranks on the SERP. Therefore, digital marketers should be always monitoring the presence of replicated content that can prevent Google from assigning you the rank that you deserve.,

⮚ Types of duplicate contents

There are primarily two types of duplicated content:

Internal duplicate contents
External duplicate contents

⮚ #1. Internal duplicate contents:

This can happen on your own website. The writer may have created two cell contents on similar topics and have used similar phrases or excerpts. There can be other causes of internal duplication of contents too. These are:

The similarity in the on-page elements like meta descriptions, page titles, and headings can also qualify as duplicate content. You can avoid this by creating innovative variations for the content on each web page.
Have you used the same product description for some items on the site? Then this will be also added to the list of copied contents. if you aim to distribute the products to third-party websites or other resellers, you have to come up with different product descriptions.

Alternatively, you can also add a summary and link it to the landing page of the website when you will provide the complete details.

⮚ #2. External duplicate contents

Such Duplicate content will appear on other websites where the developers will copy your write-up and post it on their website to boost traffic. The common instances include
Scraped Content: Webmasters often copy or steal content from another website. They use a specialized tool to rephrase and spin the content for posting on their site. Unfortunately, these “scrapers” often fail to replace the branded texts in the contents. Thus Google can easily detect such copies and can restrict the pages.
Syndicate Content: such contents differ from the scraped content because in such cases, you are allowed to post duplicate content on another site. It is possible to syndicate various blog posts, infographics and articles.

But if you want to avoid content duplication, you have to request third-party websites to syndicate only the headlines and then insert a link to your site directly for viewing the content. This policy has an upside. If you are the original content creator, you will get publicity and backlinks to yoru company’s site.

⮚ Methods to prevent duplication

You can apply several methods to stop the duplication of content on your page as well as on other web pages. the common tactics include

Taxonomy
Meta tagging
Duplicate URLs
Canonical tags
Parameter handling
Redirects

#1. Taxonomy: Regardless of whether you have a revised, existing, or old document, mapping out each page from the crawl is necessary to assign a unique H1, and focus on the keyword. #2. Meta tagging: Meta robots can help to exclude certain pages from indexing on Google. #3. Duplicate URLs: Structural [problems in the URL elements can lead to duplication errors. Without a directive, the separate URLs imply different pages. #4. Canonical tags: One of the most potent ways to eliminate the duplication of contents is to use Canonical tags. The rel=canonical element is a short snippet of HTML codes. This clearly states to the Google crawlers that you have created unique content that is not present anywhere on the digital platform. #5. Parameter handling The URL parameters will indicate how the bots crawl the sites for effective and efficient ranking on search engines. #6. Redirects: Eliminate Duplicate Content with redirects. You can redirect the duplicated pages from the website to the site where the original version of the writeup is present.

⮚ Boost ranking

If you can successfully stay away from duplicated content, you can ensure a quick boost to the SERP ranking of your web page.