Simply Understanding Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content is a common problem in the cyberspace. In fact, Raven has conducted a study between 2013 and 2015 and found that 29% of crawled pages are duplicates ratio being 71 pages out of 243 pages have been duplicated.

For Site Owners: Does it Matter if the content published is Duplicated?

Yes. For site owners, it would really matter. Duplicate content plays a big role in impacting web traffic and search engine rankings. How so?

• Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo only shows one version of the same content that is most likely to provide the best content for every enquiry searched — diluting visibility of duplicates published.
• Inbound links from other websites is a factor too. Imaging posting an original piece of content and having multiple websites duplicate it. Chances are some of your supposed inbound links and generated traffic would be transferred to them as they duplicated content from your website to theirs.

How can you avoid Duplicate Content?

Listed below are multiple ways and most common ways to avoid this from happening:

1. Use 301 redirect
   As a site owner, using 301 redirects is one of the best options to increase relevance and popularity as the potential to rank a page is being focused to one main page.
2. Use Rel=”canonical”
   A canonical version simply means a preferred version out of the many duplicates. It helps search engines identify which page should get the ranking point.

Other methods that can be done to fix duplicate content issues are:

• Usage of Meta Robots NoIndex which allows all contents published to be crawled but not indexed by search engines.
• Making sure that there is consistency in internal linking within a website.
• Adding a self-referential canonical link to all published pages within the website to thwart off scrapers.
• Reminding syndicating website to add complete URL of your content rather than a variation of the URL.

Related Tag: Marketing Agency Gold Coast