SEO Strategy
Duplicate content is something that every SEO and website owner needs to keep an eye on. If left unaddressed, duplicate content is likely to have a negative impact on your SEO and organic traffic. Having duplicate content on your site can result in several problems, including: With so much at stake, it’s important that you take the time to ensure that you aren’t inadvertently creating duplicate content for search engines to discover. Read on to learn more about how you can avoid duplicate content from a SEO perspective as well as find out what steps you can take to get rid of any duplicates you may have floating around your website.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is any portion of your website that is repeated across multiple pages or sections of your site. For example, if you have an article on your blog about the top dog breeds and you also have that article on your site’s “dog lover” page, you have a potential problem. While most of the major search engines don’t penalize you for having duplicate content on your site, they do recognize it and treat it as a low-quality signal that can result in a negative impact on your SEO. When duplicate content is discovered, search engine spiders are forced to choose which content to include in their index. Since they can’t choose both, one version of the content is left out.
Why is it important to get rid of duplicate content?
Duplicate content is seen as an issue because it dilutes your SEO efforts, meaning that your pages don’t get the attention they deserve. Search engines will focus their energies on the top-ranking pages and ignore your other, potentially valuable, pages. The more duplicates you have, the less attention your pages will receive from the search engines, which can seriously impact your site’s traffic. This can result in a loss of revenue, which is why it’s important to get rid of any duplicate content that you may have on your site.
Waste Crawl Budget:
When a search engine queries a website, it looks for fresh and updated content by crawling through the site’s different pages. Google determines how many pages on a site are crawled by the Googlebot by calculating a crawl budget. Googlebots will crawl through only a fraction of a site’s pages, not all of them. If you have the same content on numerous pages of your website, the Googlebot will crawl through the same content on multiple URLs. At the same time, the page with important and unique content may not be crawled at all. The crawl budget may be wasted on pages with duplicate content.
How to find and identify duplicate content?
Before you can get rid of any duplicate content on your site, you need to find it. Fortunately, there are a few ways that you can go about doing this.
- Check for duplicates manually – To begin, you can manually check for any duplicate content that may be on your site. You can do this by reading your pages carefully and looking for repeated phrases or sentences. If you find any, you can either remove that content or find another place to put it so that it’s no longer in danger of being flagged as a duplicate, according to Eugene Chimpoy, Church Helper
- Use a duplicate content tool – Another way to find and identify duplicate content is to use a tool designed to help you sniff out duplicate content on your site. These tools are incredibly helpful and can save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to identifying and removing duplicates, according to Andrew Drow, WellPCB
- Third-party auditing tools – If you have a large site, you may want to consider hiring a third-party auditing tool that can easily identify and remove any and all duplicates. They are often more expensive than duplicate content tools, but they can be well worth the cost in the long run. Such as Siteliner. Siteliner will begin crawling your site by following internal links. It will rapidly retrieve and analyse your content, producing a real-time report as the crawl continues, according to Farhan advani, BHPH
How to Get Rid of Duplicate Content
Once you’ve identified and removed the duplicate content from your site, you need to make sure that it doesn’t come back. This can be a tricky process and take some time, but following the tips below will help you to get rid of duplicate content for good.
- Delete pages or sections with duplicate content – The best way to get rid of any duplicate content is to delete the pages or sections that contain it. If there is a page or post on your website that is a duplicate of another, delete it.
- Modify or replace content – If you can’t delete the content in question, try modifying it so that it’s not a duplicate anymore. It’s important to do this in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the original post.
- Break out content into new pages – If you notice that you have a lot of similar content across your site, try breaking it out into individual pages that can then be linked to in multiple places. This way, each page gets the attention it deserves and there are no duplicates.
Conclusion
Duplicate content is something that every SEO and website owner needs to keep an eye on. If left unaddressed, duplicate content is likely to have a negative impact on your SEO and organic traffic. With so much at stake, it’s important that you take the time to ensure that you aren’t inadvertently creating duplicate content for search engines to discover. Follow these tips for finding and removing any duplicates that may be on your site and you’ll be well on your way to a successful SEO strategy.
Now that you know what duplicate content is and how it can impact your SEO, it’s important that you keep an eye out for it and take the necessary steps to get rid of it. By following these tips, you can ensure that you don’t have any duplicate content on your website.
