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How Duplicate Content Affects SEO & Google Rankings

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how to avoid duplicate content

Setting up an e-commerce site or a company website is straightforward, but due to stiff competition, it has become increasingly difficult to gain adequate exposure quickly. Therefore, website owners face low rankings on search results that engage strategies that will boost their online exposure.

Content creation is one tactic prolific for SEO, and plagiarism is rife in a bid to outcompete rivals for a higher ranking in search engines. Information provided by the internet and other streaming services has resulted in lots of duplicate content which is defined as a replica of textual matter on the internet.

There are instances where content is not replicated entirely but has a high degree of similarity. Such content is described as similar content or near-duplicate matter.

When To Detect Plagiarism

Before uploading content, check it’s not a replication of similar content found on another website. Quote the source if you have used a few words that originate on another site in an article or blog post.

The presence of matching content does not always attract a penalty, mainly if it’s obvious to the search engine’s algorithms that there is no pattern of behavior of copyright infringement or the passing off content that is not your own.

However, matching pages and copied content can hurt the search engine ranking of the original website. Therefore, it is a grave concern for any business owner, and they will take action to remove their content from offending sites.

Classification Of Duplicate Content

There are a couple of duplicate content categories: Taking what’s on external sites, passing it off as your own, using your existing content over and over, and passing it off as unique information.

Internal Content Replication

For lack of inspiration or laziness, internal content replication is a problem that often goes unnoticed. However, search engines will find the patterns, so automatic and manual scrutiny of the website functions and pages are required and should be significant enough to prevent the development of duplicate pages and unwanted error pages.

For all website owners, visitor traffic and interaction are vital; therefore, a decline in organic traffic to the website must be avoided or evaluated meticulously if it occurs.

Page Versions

Page versions with or without www and trailing slashes often create duplicate pages. The same problem of page rank dilution occurs when the website has HTTP and HTTPS versions. URL parameters also result in almost similar URLs that create duplicate pages.

There is no deliberate attempt to steal information in case of internal duplication, but the search engines are confounded by similar content on various web addresses.

Hence the organic clicks get circulated within the different versions, and the main page gets an average rank or is not featured on the results page.

With the help of an SEO copy checker, these problems are detected quite comfortably, and the redirects can be an immensely effective solution to the problem.

Check for Plagiarism Before Uploading Product Description On E-Commerce Site

Business owners with e-commerce platforms share product descriptions for selling their merchandise. However, similar facts also lead search engines to cancel out results with identical content.

A little bit of hard work is necessary to deal with the product specification issue. A unique product description is required for each site where the product gets featured.

This way, search engines won’t eliminate results due to duplicate content.

Content Plagiarism From External Sites

Many website owners fail to invest time and resources in quality content, which is more likely due to naiveness. Instead, they may resort to copy-paste relevant content from other websites, doing so without malicious intent. However, as the content is used by Google as one parameter to rank websites, copying it without acknowledging the source is illegal. Website owners aware of its occurrence must use it for Google.

More information can be obtained from Google’s SEO plagiarism checker; if you’ve not used it previously, it’s highly intuitive. All you have to do to find out if the content on your site has been copied is insert a few sentences of the content within the quotation marks, and once analyzed by the software, the search bar will present the results, i.e., sites that have similar content.

However, there are many reasons for showing duplicate content on other sites. Therefore it’s not always due to stealing, as website owners frequently share content on third-party sites to acquire more visitors and exposure.

Permission to use the content is inferred using citation and a link back to the website of origin with rel=”canonical.” This strategy is well-used, particularly with news sites with partnership agreements with similar websites. Sharing the content is to get more backlinks, and rankings are not harmed.

Final Thoughts

An SEO tool plagiarism checker is an efficient content checker. To improve SEO rank using unique content is necessary but not enough. There are insidious ways in which content can get stolen or duplicated within website pages.

Hence, it is vital to carefully search for instances of copied content on websites. The paid or free online plagiarism checkers and detectors can significantly help in many cases.

Google is constantly updating its algorithms. It is a core objective to filter out duplicate content from its search results to provide the best possible user experience. Additionally, it’s well known that the same content can be problematic for search engines because it can confuse them as to which version of the content should be indexed and displayed in search results.

If Google identifies duplicate content on a website, it will typically choose one version to index and display in search results while ignoring the same content. This can have negative consequences for the website owner, as their pages may not rank as well in search results if they are not chosen as the primary version.

To avoid issues with duplicate content, website owners should aim to create unique and valuable content for their pages. This can include original research, insightful analysis, and engaging storytelling. Additionally, they can use canonical tags to signal to Google which version of a page is the preferred one. They can also use 301 redirects to redirect users and search engines to the preferred version of a page.

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