The duplicate content, is something that very few websites get rid of, since most of the time, it can be something created by our own manager, not even intentionally. This type of text has a very low value for the user and can harm your web positioning.
In this post, we want to share with you exactly what we mean when we talk about duplicate content, as well as why it can be detrimental to your website’s organic ranking. There are different types of duplicate content, for which we must act differently if we want to solve them.
Read on for everything you need to know about duplicate content!
What is duplicate content?
Strictly, it is considered duplicate contentto a large set of text or source code of a web page that partially or totally coincides with another that exists on another page.
This can be of two main types, internal, when the duplications occur on the same website, or external, when they occur on different websites, which we will deal with later.
Why can it be bad for SEO?
The main objective of Google is to give the best possible response to the user. To do this, the search engine needs to track the content that each website offers for said searches.
When you find multiple versions of the same piece of content, it’s hard for search engines to determine which version to index to show in results. This reduces the performance of all versionssince they are competing with each other.
This will also be detrimental when assign authority, trust and relevance to a web pagesince it will be divided between different results, making each version weaker.
Does duplicate content penalize?
One of the most repeated questions is whether the fact of having duplicate content in a web project is a reason for a penalty. As I already anticipated duplicate content does not penalize a websiteunless it is clearly seen that the purpose of having included said content is to deceive and manipulate search engine results.
Duplicate Content Types
As we have previously commented, the duplication of content can occur in different ways, since it not only affects that these versions are found on different sites, but they can also be located on our own web page, and we are not even aware of it. Next, we will share with you some of most frequent duplicate content problems:
Internal duplicate content
Most duplicate content problems are caused by a misuse of certain parameters on our own websiteGoogle not being able to identify the content that we want to prioritize its indexing.
There is no main domain
Also called canonical domain. Our website is capable of operating with different versions (with www, without them, with the secure HTTPS version, etc.), for this reason we must tell Google which one we want it to value above the others, since otherwise each version will create pages with identical content, and we will run the risk that Google will consider them as duplicate content.
Inadequate organization of content
It is very common to find ourselves in web projects, categories with a poor classification or even, with the absence of meta descriptions, the use of identical content in different posts or the tendency in some e-commerce to copy the product sheets. This causes, in the eyes of Google, as they are differentiated URLs, it understands it as duplicate content.
URL parameters
We must bear in mind that when our website contains different versions, depending on the country or region, if we do not indicate otherwise to Google, it will be considered as duplicate content.
Therefore, it is important to use tags “hreflang”since we will be pointing out to Google that these contents are intended for different audiences.
Pagination, files, categories and tags
Each URL that appears on a website is likely to be valued by Google as duplicate content. This happens with pagination URLs, image files, categories, and tags.
For this reason, it is recommended that if we do not want Google to value said content, we can proceed to deindex it. This is where the so-calledThin Content”, which refers to very low quality or poor content, for all those URLs on our website that provide little or no content at all.
Parts of the web in development
If we allow Google to access certain URLs on our website, which are still under development, they may become indexed. Therefore, it is recommended that we can indicate this to Google within our own robots.txt file.
External duplicate content
At other times, duplicate content occurs in differentiated websites, managed by different administrators. This can occur, either because we ourselves copy an article or some fragments, when writing content for our blog, or on the other hand, that other websites copy us.
In the latter case, there are times when, even if our publication date is earlier, if your domain is very recent, Google may take into account the reputation of both pages, thinking that you are the plagiarist.
How can I fix duplicate content errors?
When troubleshooting potential duplicate content issues, it is important that you first locate that contentso we can apply a effective solution to the problem at hand.
Detect duplicate content
There are several tools, some of them free, that can help you detect duplicate content. We mention some of the most used:
- Site command: It is a very effective and recommended formula for those web projects that do not have a very high number of URLs, since if you have a lot of content, this search can become endless. It’s as easy as putting in the Google search engine: <
- Copyscape: It is used to detect those external web pages that have been able to partially or totally copy the content of your web page. It works in the same way as a search engine, simply by entering the URL that we want to analyze, it will give us a result on those pages that contain a percentage of words similar to those in our content.
- Siteliner: This tool will help us detect internal duplicate content, since it will analyze those pages on our website that have similar or duplicate content.
- Sistrix, SEMrush or Screaming Frog, are paid tools that offer us a wide range of possibilities when analyzing duplicate content. More specifically, they offer a somewhat more complex operation.
Tips to fix duplicate content
Applying effective solutions to duplicate content problems involves control and monitoring time. Although each page is different, there are some common errors, that if we carry out certain actions, we can solve certain problems of duplicate content.
- Canonical relation: Previously we already talked about this label. It is used for Google to identify the version of your website that should be set for indexing.
- robots.txt file: We recommend that if you do not have technical knowledge on the matter, leave it in the hands of professionals. But you should know that including certain pages in this file prevents Google bots from going through them.
- 301 redirects: This will help us bring Google bots to the pages that interest us. It is usually done when we have moved content from one page to another, in this way, when a user or Google itself tries to enter a page that contains duplicate content, it will automatically be redirected to the appropriate page.
- Rewrite contents: If you have identified duplicate product sheets or very similar content on your blog, it is convenient that you can rewrite said content, attacking, for example, differentiated keywords.
- Do not follow: You can include “no follow” tags, to tell Google not to access certain links placed on your website.
- Hrflang label: As we mentioned before, this will notify Google that our content is being offered to two different audiences, in language, country or region.
- It is desirable that we improve our titles, blog or product categories and their meta descriptionsproviding differentiated content.
- don’t plagiarize When working on our content strategy, even if it is only a paragraph, this is detectable.
- If we find duplicate content on external websites, we should require that it be removed. If necessary, we can also report the website to Google.
Now that you know more about the duplicate contentwe recommend that you be constant when reviewing and detecting said content, in order to solve it as soon as possible.
Since , we work when it comes to adapting the strategy, to provide the user of your website with quality content that is really relevant to them. Do not hesitate to contact us if you need more information about this service.
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