Duplicate content is a huge problem online, and your website may inadvertently be adversely affected.
You may have duplicate content on your site, and this is easy to do with many content management systems. There may also be copies of your content online from web scrapers, auto generated blogs, high authority news sites and content mills that mass produce text written by people who may not be experts in their field.
There is no greater frustration for an SEO than fighting duplicate content issues the client may not know about.
There are multiple kinds of duplicate content that you may inadvertently have on your website. Find out how to remedy this problem and fix your search engine optimization problems.
- Article Syndication Republishing articles of online authors is not recommended, and you should have the original content on your website. If you do syndicate content, make sure you get a backlink from the article. You don’t want your original article to be construed by search engines as an attempt to pass off the content as your own, while the other website gets the ranking boost. Always insist websites link to your original document when republishing any content.
- Content Scraping Blogs may scrape your feed and republish multiple posts without your knowledge. There is often nothing that we can do to stop this, but there is a way to make this work to your benefit. By including multiple links in each blog post, the scrapers will be copying links back to your website. Make sure all blog post links have the full root URL, so any copied content will link back to you.
- Website Mirroring Make sure you do not have accidental canonical versions of your website, such as www, www1, ., login etc. If an entire website is an exact duplicate of another you will have problems. use the rel=canonical tag and use permanent 301 redirects to remove any duplicate versions. Translating your website is into different languages is an acceptable practice and can help with localized search engine optimization.
- Quoting Quoting portions of other articles or content is ok, as long as at least 50% of the content is original. It is ok to copy several paragraphs, and using any content beyond this requires an attribution link to the source webpage.
- E-Commerce Product Pages Shopping carts can create repetitive content for various content types in a shopping catalog. For example a chair vendor may have a large listing of the same office chairs with the exact same title and description. This may be fixed by removing the repetitive descriptions and replacing them with a single product description in the header followed by a listing of the available products. A better solution is to rewrite the description of each product.
- Multiple Versions Many content management systems and blog publishing systems create multiple versions of content that are available for search engines to index. WordPress creates duplicates in the posts, pages, archives, tags, and categories sections. All but one copy of the should be blocked from search engines using your site’s robots.txt file.
These are common duplicate content problems that cause endless frustration for SEO’s.
If you find duplicate pages on your site, use your analytics to see which one receives the most traffic and redirect all other pages to this page as it is the strongest.
If you have any mysterious ranking problems you have faced it is possible you have a duplicate content or mis-attributed content problem that should be examined.
24 Responses
Every time I research SEO there’s something new and improved to learn from. Now I can create content and dominate the duplicators. Thank you for explaining duplicate content in an easy to understand format.
Very good info about how to deal with duplicate content, I will start syndicating with embedded links.
nice website thanx for comment
This is awesome post – for a long time I’ve never been able to figure out how to deal with content scrapers. Merci.
if you want to know more about starperson then visit starsporthd com
Informative article with the helpful tips
The google penguin update trashed us – others were stealing all our pages for their own SEO.
really nice explanation of the huge duplicate content problem – I know that Google would rather have everyone publish using google+, as all original authors would be known.
I’ve been following the duplicate content debate for a long time now and finally got the understanding to effectively cross post content.
Have you ever thought about creating an ebook or guest authoring on other sites? I have a blog based upon on the same information you discuss and would love to have you share some stories/information. I know my subscribers would appreciate your work. If you are even remotely interested, feel free to shoot me an e-mail.
I’ve bookmarked this, to share duplicate content strategies with others.
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later
I’m starting a new website and don’t want anyone to copy my content. How will this help me to protect my site from others looking for SEO benefits from my work?
This is awesome post – for a long time i‘ve never been able to figure out how to deal with content scrapers. Merci.
Wonderful insight about duplicated content, I’m glad my hard work is safe.
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. Content is still king.
Since creating content for some time, i have had problems getting it SEO’s. My ecological niche is difficult to promote.
If you’re still on the fence about duplicate content: grab your favorite feed, head down to wordpress and start autoblogging. You will find few webmasters optimize their content feeds.
I’ll definitely have to look into this. I like to read about IM aloud, it helps me understand the material.
Helpful information about duplicate content. We do information sharing.
Thank you for explaining duplicate content in an easy to understand format.
Every time I research SEO there’s something new and improved to learn from. Now I can create content and dominate the duplicators.
Proper SEO can be your Rocket to take the worry out of your duplicate website content and add kick butt in the search engines. Create original content that converts readers into subscribers – this is the secret sauce to SEO.
Yes, this article is a good description of fixing SEO because it’s full of facts about duplicated content.
very good info about how to deal with duplicate content, I will start syndicating with embedded links.