How Duplicate Content Affects SEO And How To Deal With It

In the past few years, the issues of duplicate content online have become a huge debate. Content spamming and duplicate penalties by the major search engines like Google have been rolled out in equal measure. In the past, it was easy for webmasters to scrape other people’s web content and use it as their own. Things are changing. Nowadays, it doesn’t help much.

Not directly in association with the penalties by Google, but merely as a consequence of it working against SEO efforts. The way this works is simple. Duplicate content is filtered and it’s hard for it to find its way in the top rankings. This article will tell you what duplicate content is and easy ways to deal with it on the website.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content results when you have one or more similar pages available to the search engine crawlers on the web. Basically, it refers to similar pages on the same or different domains. Whereas there are numerous rogue webmasters out there, a few honest webmasters cause duplicate content issues through the following ways and end up on the search engines receiving end.

1. Using doorway pages with same content but different domains is a major puller. To users, these pages are okay. However, to the search engines, these doorway pages are just another group of duplicates.
2. Distributed press releases is also a form of duplicate content. Search engines occasionally use these directories and websites with the content as the main authority. In the end, you have a website that has authority duplicated content, passing penalties to the main site.
3. Affiliate tracking links are another common source of duplicate web content. Many websites have been found on the receiving end of this. MLM programs are the most prominent types. What these links do is completely hurt the ranking of the affiliate programs landing pages.
4. Having multiple unique urls with the same content or page is another killer. The search engines treat these as duplicate pages and will unleash their penalties. This problem is rampant for sites built with content management systems.
5. Creating subdomains that direct to the same page is another duplicate content issue. This issue can also be linked directly to the lack of the authoritative www and non-www versions of the websites. These often lead to duplicates which cause penalties to main websites.
   

How search engines deal with these duplicates

Search engines have a duplicate content filter. These indexes the different pages then decide which one is more relevant. In the end, content on different domains is un-indexed and sometimes, totally removed from the search engines. The other way search engines deal with duplicates is through duplicate content penalties. These are punitive. If you deliberately try to cheat the system, the search engines ban your website. As you can tell, duplicate content is bad for you and your business.

How to deal with duplicates

The best approach to avoid duplicates is not participating in the first place. You can also choose to make these pages un-index able to the search engines with the Meta robots tag. Using the rel-canonical tag can also help you state where authority is on a website and avoid duplicates.

Using content checkers

These checkers can enable you tell what pages are duplicates and hence useless to search engines. Running a fast check on duplicate content checker Plagspotter will enable you deal with duplicate content issues and return your website in good light with the search engines.

Source:- BUSINESS2COMMUNITY