Uncategorized
28 February 2024
Before understanding whether your content is duplicate or not, let’s learn what duplicate content means;
Off-site duplicate content is when an exact copy of content from your website is found on another website with a different address. In such a case, your original content has been copied and published by third parties. To fix this situation, there’s not much you can do other than sending a copyright infringement report to Google.
On-site duplicate content refers to having two very similar or identical pieces of content on multiple pages of your website. Generally, repetitive content adds little to no value to your website from the visitors’ perspective.
From an SEO standpoint, duplicate content can harm SEO performance by sending mixed signals to search engines, confusing them.
For a website with hundreds of pages, if there are more than a dozen pieces of duplicate content, search engines will struggle to decide which content to use. Not being able to decide which content to show in search results will lower the performance of all pages. Having many pages will also waste search engines’ crawl budget over time, leading to decreased trust in the site.
Damaged site reliability means that getting high traffic as before will be a challenging process.
Duplicate content can significantly harm your SEO performance, but you won’t receive a penalty from Google for duplicate content unless you directly copy content from another website.
Suppose you use https as your website infrastructure, but your content is also accessible via www. extensions. In this case, poor configuration of your website will result in duplicate content.
If you have a URL that includes uppercase and lowercase letters and slashes, Google will treat URLs with such content differently, considering your content as duplicates.
Due to a poorly configured website, your homepage can be accessed through multiple URLs without your knowledge, making your homepage considered as duplicate content.
You can use SEO Crawler tools to understand whether your content is duplicate. Regularly perform technical SEO checks on your website, redirect detected duplicate content through 301 redirects to the relevant page, or tag the page with the same content that is not a priority for you as “canonical.” This way, these pages will no longer be considered duplicate content, saving your site’s crawl budget and not negatively affecting your SEO performance.
