How to Deal With Duplicate Content in SEO?

Posted by eSign Web Services Pvt Ltd on March 24th, 2021

There is no such thing as a “Duplicate Content Penalty” in Google. It is because Google understands that one can't create 100% unique content as everything on the search engine has been created by referring to something that already existed there.

However, in recent times, web developers and digital marketers have started to put more emphasis on duplicate content SEO. Even though a copied content will not face any penalty from Google, it will also not rank high on the SERPs.

To tackle this issue properly, one first needs to understand what duplicate content is and how to deal with such plagiarism in SEO.

WHAT IS DUPLICATE CONTENT IN SEO?

Content is said to be duplicated if it appears in more than one website address or URL. It affects a page’s ranking if Google detects more than one “appreciably similar” piece of contents in different locations. As the search engine does not understand which one is credible and which site actually copied from whom, it can randomly drop a page from its rank.

While about 29% of the sites are, in fact, duplicated, Google is still updating its Panda algorithm to reward information-rich credible contents. This means if one can tackle the duplicate content issues, he/she can easily sustain the website position or even get a higher ranking.

HOW TO AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES IN SEO?

1. IDENTIFY THE DUPLICATE CONTENT PROBLEM

There are multiple ways to find out whether there exists content seemingly similar to your webpage content or not.However, the simplest ways to solve duplicate content issues are:

• Looking for alerts from Google webmasters as they proactively notify you if there are any copied content on your website or not.
  
  
• Pick a couple of sentences and search for them on Google. This will show you if there are indeed pages with similar content (plagiarism).
  
  
• One can also do a simple search with a keyword that a particular content ranks for and see if the URL it is showing is user-friendly or not.

Apart from these, several websites like Screaming Frog lets one check the uniqueness of content for free.

1. Use Duplicate Content SEO Techniques

The issue with duplicate page content is so predominant on the internet that Google itself guides on how to deal with them.

Here are a few methods that one can utilize to solve this issue.

• Incorporate 301 redirects: Use 301 redirects in content and channel the traffic from the duplicated content to the original one.
  
  
• Be careful about content syndication: Syndicate contents carefully and always make sure that the content links back to the original site and not a version of it.
  
  
• Rel canonical: Add a rel=canonical link to theexisting page and safeguard content from scarpers and SEO stealers.
  
  
• Use UTM parameters judiciously: It is ideal to use hashtags instead of question marks while using UTM parameters. It is because once the search engine crawler gets to the hash tag, it ignores everything that follows this sign, thereby avoiding duplicate content issues.

By using these techniques, one can avoid facing a duplicate content issue. However, if Google webmaster still bugs with notificationsregarding duplicate content, it is ideal that one seeks professional help.

If one continues to integrate expertise and new ideas into his/her content, the chances of writing duplicate content become significantly less. Thus, even though there are numerous tools and techniques to avoid duplication, it is always wise to put one’s own insight into the content. If you keeppracticing this along with the techniques discussed in this article, there will be hardly any encounter with duplicate content SEO.