Problems That Can Occur When Duplicating Content – Khachaturyan Nataliya, Semalt Expert Explains How To Cope With The Issue

Duplicate content is the type of content that appears on the world wide web at multiple places, and if the same articles appear at different websites, your site's ranking will be decreased, and it may get penalized by Google. It's safe to say that duplicate content can greatly impact your search engine, ranking. When there is more than one piece of content on the internet, Google and other search engines will dislike it and may decide to push those sites behind the competition.

Why does duplicate or copied content matter?

Khachaturyan Nataliya, Semalt Content Strategist, explains that for the search engines, duplicate or copied content presents three main problems:

  • They are unable to understand which version of the content should be crawled and which one should be banned.
  • They don't know anything about whether to direct the link metrics to a specific website or keep them in different versions.
  • The search engines cannot understand which version of the content should be ranked for the query results.

For the webmasters and bloggers, duplicate content can also cause a variety of problems

  • It provides poor user experience, and the search engines are forced to penalize multiple websites at a time even when you are an original publisher of a specific article.
  • For providing better search experience, Google will show up different versions of the same content and will dilute the visibility of all the duplicate pieces.
  • Link equity may also be diluted as other websites have copied your content to build links to their own websites. This can leave a negative impact on the visibility of your content in the search engine results.

How do I fix the duplicate content?

Fixing the duplicate or copied content is possible when you correct all the issues in your content and scan it through Copyscape before publishing it on the internet. Whenever you find copies of the content on multiple websites, you should report to Google or contact that site's administrator to get the duplicate content removed before it's too late and Google decides to penalize your site.

The 301 redirect method

In some cases, you can combat the duplicate content by setting up the 301 redirects from the duplicate pages to your original content. When different pages are linked back to the same URL, they will automatically stop competing with each other and will not create relevancy in future.

The Rel="canonical" method

Another option is named the rel=canonical method. It lets Google, Bing and Yahoo know that your web page should be treated as genuine and the other similar pages should be treated as the duplicate. Let us here tell you that the rel=canonical attributes are part of the HTML code of your web pages.

Other methods to deal with duplicate content

You should maintain consistency while developing internal links throughout your site. When syndicating content, you should make sure that the syndicating site has added a link back to your original content and there is no variation on its URL. For maximizing your site's protection and saving your content from being copied on the internet, you can add self-referential rel=canonical links to all your web pages.