How to Deal with Duplicate Content

In the modern age, everything from lifestyle to business has become digital. Gone are the ancient days when physical real estate was an imperative before doing anything. People are behind the screen, constantly looking to improve their life with content creation. Content is something that sells quickly. This is due to its multidimensional nature as being informative or fun and suiting the artistic needs. Every company needs good content to sell its services or products and ensure well-being.

Dedicated writers and teams are hired to forge content strategies before venturing into the global market. Increasingly, digital marketing sectors are growing beyond predictions and taking full advantage of the opportunity. Indeed, the internet has opened a casket full of new shots for people to take and test their luck.

Well, this is all good except the fact that content can get duplicated too!

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content refers to the replication of content in different sites or webpages. It can either include a full-fledged exact copy or certain portions being alike. Just like in our physical world, there are addresses to locate each other, search engines acquire URLs to navigate different webpages, and if the same content shows up in two distinct addresses, you are indeed facing a detrimental issue.

As the internet grows and blooms into becoming the largest platform for businesses, content duplication is taking a road towards normalcy. While there is no prescribed penalty, it entails massive significance in your site ranks and is treated by Google.

Search engines love new and novel content! With duplicate content, you take a toll on your user experience and are deteriorating your gamble with the algorithms. Therefore, it becomes crystal clear that we do not want content duplication under any circumstances, so we need to explore how to deal with it. This blog has everything you need to know when encountering duplicate content!

Why Does Duplicate Content Matter in SEO?

For search engines, duplicate content poses several problems. Most of them can be rounded off towards sheer complexity. Whenever a user searches for something, a search engine scrolls through the directory of results looks for relevance by skimming through pages before finalizing the results it will display. This is a task performed best when every page is distinct in terms of content and everything. Now, if there is duplicate content, the search engine won't know which page to showcase.

Secondly, search engines find it cumbersome to determine the cleavage between directing link metrics to a page and keeping it separated among different versions. Once again, it adds up to the overall complexity and worsens your bet with the algorithm.

Moreover, with duplication, it’s likely, your webpage won't show up, thanks to the deterioration in the search engine’s cohesive work.

Duplicate Content Issues for Search Engines

In case you want to be educated with even more issues related to duplicate content, we are here with all the details.

For instance, when content gets duplicated, it casts a shadow over your efforts. This is because the search engine becomes unable to categorize which page to include in its indices. Ultimately, this transpires into events like full-fledged separation from the main index, leading to the burial of hopes with SEO.

Besides, link equity receives a toll on itself too. This is brought about because an inbound link connects with several pages instead of one and worsens one's chances of substantial visibility.

This is everything you can ignore if you hire BThrust for your work! With skilled, talented and adroit individuals, we bring performance, unlike everything you have seen before!

How Do Duplicate Content Issues Happen?

There are two significant reasons for duplicate content; accidental and intentional.

When talking about accidental occurrences, we give the benefit of the doubt. Such a saturated user base can likely result in linking ideas that could be executed in the same way. In most instances, accidental duplication happens with small parts of the overall content rather than the entire thing. Under no logic can we conceive that full-fledged duplication could be a product of an accident.

However, deliberate content duplication, especially full-fledged copying, is deemed to be a kind of stealth. No matter how much our minds can relate and correspond to each other, execution can never be a full-on exact match. With no benefit of the doubt, this type of duplication is one to forsake strictly.

Some of the other reasons for content duplication are as followed.

URL Variations

URL parameters include analytic code and click tracking. One of the primary reasons for duplicate content is this! The order in which you add parameters matters, as similar versions can lead to duplication. Similarly, duplicate content can also happen when a user is given a session ID different from the one stored in the URL. Moreover, having pages with printer-friendly modifications can also lead to duplication as several versions can get stored in the index.

To all these technical SEO problems, BThrust is the solution! With years of experience and top-notch strategy implementation, we are ready to treat your SEO problems as ours and deal with even the most severe of duplicate content cases.

HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW pages

Having multiple URLs for distinct pages can also lead to duplicate content. Essentially, the thing is to assign different content to a different address. However, negating intricacies like the irregularity in the use of WWW for a specific page can create problems. For instance, if you assign the same page two URLs, one with WWW. and one without it, you are summoning the search engine to treat it as two. Ultimately, this results in difficulty determining what must be entered within the index, and so your page may never find its place there.

These issues are prevalent on the internet. BThrust deals with them just about every other day and is proficient in helping you eradicate your problems with solutions marked with excellence.

Scraped or Copied Content

Copied content is becoming a norm, especially with the rise of e-commerce sites. Just imagine 1000 global websites selling the same product with the same description. It will definitely lead to duplication, right?

Well, of course, it will! Some people copy content such as blog posts from different portals and post them online. Once again, copied and scraped content, no matter how possessed, will be subject to duplication. Hence, we ascertain that duplicate content is fatal to your online life! While being unethical, it's one of the practices people consider with seriousness and tend to use.

However, we negate such means and only go for ways that inspire confidence and belief in your company.

How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues

With problems come solutions! A multitude of them! No matter how the content gets duplicated, we want to know if the original version of it. This can be done by several techniques that we use and definitely recommend as a top-notch SEO company. Since we talked about the fact that not every duplicate content is an instance of thievery, you need to approach the problem with peace of mind that gives you complete control over the situation before identifying the best solution.

Every solution that we will be discussing is marked with its very own effectiveness and usability. These have been learned through the first-hand experience, meaning you can be sure of their fruitful outcomes.

301 Redirect

What would you say if we tell you that you can merge all the duplicate pages into one? Sounds like magic, right!? While, to some extent, it is. The trick here is to use 301 redirects on the duplicated page to the original page. This is a widely acknowledged practice as it also eradicates the competition between the two pages and lets both grow. As this technique equates good for the original piece, you should always have it in your realm of considerations.

Rel="canonical"

This is a more intense and groundbreaking strategy. It tells the algorithm that certain specified pages are duplicates of the original, so all performance metrics must be applied. As a result, one single page takes the cut for the most benefits, in contrast to what happens with 301 redirects.

Meta Robots Noindex

A meta robots tag with a prescribed Noindex value prevents a particular page from entering the index. The search engine can still crawl the page but is stopped from searching it in the index.

A company like Bthrust SG is structured on utmost comprehension of this and other strategies and can help you fix your duplicate content issues with ease. We believe that the internet should be the least of your concerns and thus attire ourselves with all the necessary skills to make your online life easier and better. We mark everything with perfection and sublimity and no duplicate content leaves our sight before getting squashed.