Search Engines are known to take action against those websites that contain Duplicate or Similar content. A website is said to contain duplicate content when a significantly large amount of content is similar to that of other websites on internet, the site has multiple URL’s with same content or there exist identical homepages with the same content.
When a search engine robot comes across two different webpages with similar content, it would usually decide which version to keep, which is in most cases the better one. This results in disregard or elimination of the other page. Duplicate Content may sometimes attract a penalty from search engines too.
Despite all this, there is conflict among experts about the subject of duplication. It is still a complex issue to decide which site contains duplicate content and what comes under the definition of duplicate content. This article can help you know more about duplicate content.
However, you must keep your page similarity as low as possible by using fresh and unique content and avoiding duplicate or copied content.
Reasons for Duplication
The following causes can possibly result in duplication of content on a website:
- To manipulate search engine rankings
- To win more traffic
- To increase keyword density
- To fill up empty spaces
- To attract customers for exploration of site
- To serve contextual ads
Results of Duplication
Following are the consequences which a website might have to face because of duplicate content:
- Poor user experience
- Decline in the ranking of the site
- Banning of the site on search engines
- Possible removal from main index to supplemental index
- Decrease in traffic
- Diverse effect on reputation
- Decline in customer trust
Tips to Reduce Duplication
The steps explained below can help in avoiding duplicate content and reduce the fear of being charged for duplication. These tips have proved useful to make sure that you have fresh and unique content on your website.
- If there are pages on your website that contain similar content, and you don’t want them to be crawled by search engine robots in order to avoid the charge of duplication, block those pages to make them uncrawlable so that only the finest version of your content is available to be indexed.
- Do not create multiple URL’s for your pages. These can confuse and sometimes prevent users and spiders from visiting your site.
- If you have renewed or updated your webpages, 301 redirect is used to redirect users as well as spiders effectively to the moved or restructured pages of your website. This would help people as well as search robots to go straight to the pages with updated and distinctive content.
- Your internal links should be consistent to avoid confusion. Use a 301 redirect to move different versions of your home page URL to one consistent URL.
- Country-level domains should be expressed whenever possible through top level domains. This would give clear and appropriate information about a webpage.
- Ensure that those sites, where you have syndicated your content, include a link to your original article. Robots.txt file can be used to block any unbeneficial version of your article or content to avoid duplication.
- Webmaster Tools are recommended to make clear to search engines how you prefer your site to be indexed.
- It is advisable to publish only those pages which contain real and useful text. Absence of content, while the pages are present and crawlable, can have a diverse effect. It would seem as if you are trying to deceive users as well as spiders.
- Get familiar with the method of display of your content. Try not to put the same content in multiple formats or locations.
- Write fresh and new content for every page. Use keywords and title tags to inform the reader what your page is about and write the content according to title.
- Make sure that all your title tags and Meta descriptions are unique.
- Do not, in any case, republish content from other sites. This can create copyright problems.
- Be creative while writing your content. Express your ideas in an original and innovative way.
- You should be careful while sharing your content on or with other sites.
- Avoid rewriting and reprinting other people’s material
Avoiding duplicate content can help improve your website on the search engines, as well as help to build trust among the website visitors.