How to Identify and Resolve Duplicate Content Issues
What is Duplicate Content ?
Duplicate Content is a content that appears in more than just one spot online. the “just one spot” stands for the original and “unique” content with a unique URL. If the same content appears more than once online it is called Duplicate content.
This Content is the exact same copy of the original one. Same structure, same title and subtitles, same semantics, entities, paragraph. And just simply swapping words will not change something as creating duplicate content.
It can as well be referring to the same content on multiple pages of your website. Or content from another website that has the same paragraph or sentences.
What is the problem with Duplicate ?
For Search Engine
For Search Engine Duplicate Content is a strong issue because the engine can have a hard time identifying the “original content” and so choose which page should rank first.
In addition, they Do not know which page includes or excludes from their index. The engine might not be able to be sure what page should receive all the link metrics credit (TF, CF, DA..) or if those metrics should be separated between each page.
For website Owners
It goes against a good web search experience for users. Duplicate content can impact their ranking, because the content is not “new and original” it shows a bad signal to Google. Instead of sending all the seo juice to one specific content, Google will delude de juice for all the pages and Thus lost of ranking
How Duplicate Content Happened
Online presence is a though world. Lot of different websites for any kind of niche and everyone want to be add the top. But there is only One position zero
Thus people started to use existing content and to just copy/past it on their own website. Doing this technic mean that words are the same, text is the same and so the page. Thus Google can not really identify which content is the “real” one or we call it “canonical content or original content”.
Sometimes people can create a duplicate content without knowing it. They write a page or article but the similarity with another content is so high that Google will consider it as duplicate content and so it will affect your ranking
How to Fix Duplicate Content
Fixing Duplicate Content will allow you to rank better and improve your EAT (expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness) Towards Google
301 redirection
One thing that you can do is to change the content, say the same thing but differently. Create a unique version of it and use a 301 redirection using a different URL to show Google you create something different. Google will understand it as a good signal.
Use a Canonical tag
when you have multiple version of the same content you can do a canonical version of the first content using the attribut rel=”canonical”. A canonical attribut indicate to search engine that this content is the original and thus should be treated as such. You can do a self referring canonical as well, meaning that your original page will auto refer herself
Google or Bing will therefore send all the seo juice and ranking power to this page instead of splitting it through different duplicated pages