Duplicate Content & SEO: Don’t Get Penalised By Google

Duplicate Content & SEO: Don’t Get Penalised By Google‏

When you are just starting with a new website for your business, it can be tempting to make use of the wealth of content already present on the internet. After all, it isn’t like duplicate content would affect your SEO, right?‏

‏Wrong.‏

‏There is one visitor to your website that will always detect duplicate content and penalize you heavily for it. We are, of course, talking about search engines, or more specifically, the most popular search engine of all, Google.‏

‏But why does Google care if the piece of content on your web page matches some obscure web page hosted half a world away? What kind of penalties are we talking about here? How exactly does it affect your SEO?‏

‏Let’s find out.‏

‏Why Google Frowns Upon Duplicate Content‏

‏to reap the best potential from your SEO efforts in Dubai, you need to be careful in your SEO strategies. You can always contact us for our effective SEO interventions that will be fruitful for your cause.

Here is a quick refresher on how search engines work:‏

‏A web crawler surfs the internet, indexing any content that it finds along with their web addresses. Depending on a large number of factors (most of which are affected directly by your SEO), the search engine then builds a ranked list, which it then uses to display search results.‏

‏Simple right? But how does duplicate content factor into this?‏

‏You see, unlike a human visitor, ‏ ‏Google’s web crawler has visited ‏ ‏every‏ ‏ webpage out there.‏ ‏ So when it encounters content it has already encountered elsewhere, it runs into a problem; which of these pages should it index?

You should know that even though search engines, such as Google, do not penalize websites if they upload duplicates, you can be disadvantaged by using such content. You will not reap the potential best out of the efforts that you use for your website because the search engines will filter such content; the identical content. The filters imposed on the identical content that you upload will be bad for your SEO efforts because it will affect the ranking of your website.

Identical content will sort of lead to your website performing dismally when it comes to the results in search engines such as Google. Your web pages will rank in the bottom of the list and this will make you lose valid user traffic.

What identical content used in web pages does to search engines is that sort of confuses them. They are torn between which of the web pages to rank at the top of the lists of their results. This is the list of results that are presented to users when they search in the internet.

Many underlying shortcomings come with using duplicated content for your website. ‏

‏Duplicate Content Wrecks Your SEO‏

‏Google’s algorithms resolve this dilemma with a simple expedient: reducing the rank of the pages with duplicates. ‏ ‏This means that even if your SEO practices are impeccable, duplicate content will severely impact your SEO.‏

‏In rare cases, Google might even decide to remove your page from its index entirely, as the existing index already links to the same content. ‏ ‏Which means that your site never shows up in search results at all.‏

‏Even if you avoid this eventuality by reducing your dependence on duplicated content, every page that uses existing content drags down the search rankings and hence the visibility of your whole site.‏

Duplicate Content Wrecks Your SEO‏

Internal Duplicate Content

‏Sometimes, instead of plagiarism, the problem may lie with an incorrectly configured web page. This is especially prevalent in eCommerce sites, where the same product might be linked-to in various ways, depending on where the user came from.‏

‏If your website backend generates a new URL for each of these links, then ‏ ‏Google will classify them all as a duplicate content. ‏ ‏This is because the web crawler tries to index each unique URL separately.‏

Duplicate content can exist in your web pages if either;

You have similar content used across different web pages of your website, they may exist in the different URLs (locations) of your website
If the content can be found through various means. For instance, the same posts which are given when a search is made based on a variety of categories and tags that are used on your website

‏There are many ways to solve this problem. You can reconfigure your website to make heavy use of cookies instead to store user information, which leaves the URL parameters free from the burden of carrying this data.‏

‏You can also use HTTP parameters to pass on this information, as these additions are not considered a part of the URL and do not lead to the pitfall of being classified as duplicate.‏

‏The Solution: You Need to Invest in Quality Content‏

‏Apart from getting SEO right, a cornerstone of making your website rank higher is the quality of your content. ‏ ‏At the end of the day, Google ranks your page based on how unique and popular your content is, not how many technical parameters you get right.‏

‏And people are only attracted to content that they find genuinely useful, not to mention easy to understand.‏

‏Therefore, the best way to improve the visibility of your site is to populate it with quality content that fits your brand image and adds value to readers, instead of scraping content from the internet.‏

There are many ways that you can use to guarantee that the content that you upload in your web pages is of great quality and not duplicated content. You will need to ensure this if you mainly deal with selling to third party buyers. This is because you are probably selling a same product to clients as your business rivals. They may describe products in a specific design. If you copy this design either intentionally or unintentionally, you might be negatively affected.

What happens is that when you upload similar content, using similar keywords, then search Google might be confused when listing search results. Your site may not even be listed if a keyword-relevant to your web pages is searched in these search engines. One reason is probably that the other websites are probably superior to yours.

How you can avoid complications that come with duplicate content?

One thing for sure is that you do not want to be negatively affected by the shortcomings that affect your site when you use duplicate content in your web pages. You can avoid this by using a special and genuine page title. This will indicate that you have uploaded something new to your web pages.

For the meta description, which is a brief description of the content that you have uploaded on the web page. This is usually included in the HTML code for that particular page, together with the page title.

You should also put up new headings for each of your pages on your site. The headlines should be unique and should differ from that used on every other page. What a search console does is that it first look at the headlines to have a hint of what your web pages are all about.

You also need to describe your products and services in a unique way from every other website that deals with the product. You need the description that you include in your site concerning a product to differ significantly from other sites’. This will give the search console a clear understanding of your website being a different one from the others. Otherwise, you may duplicate description from content from a site with a better ranking in search engine and this will be disastrous for you.

Webmasters also works for you by providing canonical links that are ideal for dealing with duplicate content issues. This is a proven technique that should work for any of your business sites.

How to detect duplicate content in your website?

From the above, you can gather that some website designers use duplicate content in their site unintentionally. This is why you should be able to employ efforts to detects such instances to avoid being on the grey areas as long as duplicated content is concerned;

Search a the keyword

You can make a search for any keyword that is relevant to your business. If you notice that Google is giving a non-user-friendly URL of your content, then there is a high chance that you have duplicated content in your web pages. You should make sure that there is no content duplicate results on the piece of content that you have on your page.

Be on the lookout for alerts in webmasters

Webmasters should be able to give you alerts if it detects duplicated content in your web pages. You can put up an account with webmasters and use it for this cause.

Lookout for metrics of Crawler

The crawler metrics can be accessed when you are in your webmaster’s account. This usually appears at the dashboard of this account and the metrics indicate the number of pages that have been crawled on.

Search for a block of content

You can perform this by taking a few sentences from one web page from your site. If you make a search in a search engine, and it shows different sites posting that content, then you will be dealing with content duplicate.

You should be aware that search engines can easily detect duplicated content through various algorithms that are used to design them. This will damage the reputation of your site and even though you might not get penalized, you will not reap the best from your efforts in Google ranking search results. Everything you do will be null and void!

What percentage of duplicate content is allowed?

When it comes to the percentage of duplicate content that search engines such as Google allow to be used, it is not well defined. You just need to ensure that your pages are free of duplicate content as much as possible to avoid being ranked lowly because of content issues n search engines.

You can do this by ensuring that the content that you upload for one page is not similar for the other pages. This should help you avoid dealing with duplicate content issues that might sabotage all your efforts in attaining optimization of your web pages. One effective way is through the use of url parameters that will define the web pages in a way that avoids dealing with duplicate content.

Webmasters could also work for you by using canonical links that will prevent duplicate content issues that affect the performance efforts. They accomplish this by indicating the canonical or the preferred version of a particular web page in question. This will guarantee that your business site is able to perform well in search engines such as Google.