Duplicate Content and SEO

Duplicate Content and SEO

It’s long been a known fact that websites shouldn’t have duplicate content, but the reasons as to why and how it can affect your SEO rankings are sometimes quite vague.

You should have a clear understanding as to why original content is so valuable can help you develop a better content strategy without the disadvantages that identical copy can bring to your site.

According to Google: "a duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin."

Read more (Avoid creating duplicate content): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

TYPES OF DUPLICATE CONTENT:

1. Internal duplicate content is when your website creates duplicate content through multiple internal URLs (on the same website).
2. External duplicate content, also known as cross-domain duplicates, occurs when two or more different websites have the same page copy indexed by the search engines.

METHODS OF IDENTIFYING DUPLICATE CONTENT:

There are many tools and methods available to help you identify any content that could pose a problem.

• CopyScape
• Siteliner
• SEMRush

You can also manually search for your content using Google search. You can copy a small excerpt of text from your article, and then enter it into the search bar to see if similar results show up.

While it’s more time-consuming, it’s an effective way of identifying duplicate content elsewhere on the web.

FIXING DUPLICATE CONTENT ON YOUR SITE: (For Better SEO)

There are various ways to fix SEO issues related to duplicate content.

1. 301 redirects and Rel=”canonical” tags
2. Rel=”prev” and rel=”next” for pagination pages
3. DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Google
4. Effective content marketing strategy.

Google tried to kill off the duplicate content issue years ago with the Google Panda update. Google's Panda algorithm update is a search filter introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google's top search results. Panda is updated from time to time. And sites previously hit may escape if they've made the right changes.

WILL HAVING DUPLICATE CONTENT AFFECT MY SITE?

It’s best to avoid duplicate content not necessarily because the penalty is as scary as many search engine myths about duplicate content say, but because it works against your search engine and online business success by keeping your pages from getting good rankings, or even showing up in search results.

WILL REPUBLISHING MY EXISTING CONTENT AFFECT MY SITE (FROM GUEST BLOGGING, ARTICLE SUBMISSION, WEB 2.0 SITES - LINKEDIN, MEDIUM, ETC.)?

Googlebot visits a million sites every day. If it finds a copied content version of something a week later on another site, it knows where the original appeared. Googlebot doesn’t get angry and penalize. It moves on.

Reusing the first paragraph of your blog post is fine, but when you start re-posting a few paragraphs or more, you are asking for trouble.

When there are too many duplicate pages on your own site, you end up diluting your ability to rank for that particular page by forcing those pages to compete against one another in the search engines.

It's always better to re-write the content before publishing or post the content on the other site only. Sites such as Medium and LinkedIn will promote your article to their own community members if your article is worthy enough.

Republishing your content won’t help you generate much more traffic than you already have. I’ve tested this scenario with authority sites that get over a million visitors a month. It’s very rare that they ever drive more than 1-10% visitors from a repost. (as a SEO'er we mostly look into acquiring links from these authority sites)

There may be a few scenarios where the duplicate content will outrank the original:

1. When the duplicate adds more value to the content vs the original. The author might add graphs, data, images, video, etc to cover the subject with more depth and clarity.
2. The authority of the website where the duplicate is found is much higher than the website where the original is posted.
3. Original content isn’t optimized for SEO. No clear title tag, H1 (heading tags), slow loading speed, not mobile responsive, etc.

A SIDE NOTE:

I understand every marketer has his own perspective, style, tricks, and strategy. But my concern is blindly conveying a wrong or incomplete message to newbies. If you teach DM to people and consider yourself a teacher then it's your responsibility to answer your followers, students, and aspiring marketers. Or at least point them in the right direction.

And if possible, share your original experience. So others can be aware of it too.

Hope this helps.