By this occasion, we want to draw your attention to the duplicate content of a site. This does not result in a penalty from Google but can affect the rankings in search engine results.
But what is this duplicate content?
It is the content which appears on the Internet in several places under different web addresses (URL). So if the same text (content) appears on more than one page of a site means you have double content.
How has search engine result influenced if you have duplicate content?
If the same content appears in multiple places, Google doesn’t know which version it should include or exclude from indexing, if it should direct the links to a single page or keep separate links from multiple versions and how to rank them.
In most cases, these duplication issues are not intentionally created by the site owners, but that does not mean they are not to blame for creating these problems. The parameters and order in which they appear in the URL can cause duplicate content issues, as are session IDs. One solution is, when possible, not to add URL parameters or alternative versions of URLs (the information they contain can usually be transmitted through scripts).
HTTP or HTTPS and WWW pages. Or without WWW. Can also create duplicate content issues. If you have separate versions for “www.site.com” and simply “site.com” and the same content appears on both versions, you created duplication of each of these pages. The same goes for sites that have a version of both HTTP: // and https: //, if both are active and visible on search engines, you have a good chance of experiencing a duplicate content problem.
Last but not least, we can talk about duplicate content if you use the text on the site to republish the substance of another site found on the internet. The duplication issue does not just refer to category descriptions or blog posts, but also to product descriptions. If multiple sites have the same products and they use the same descriptions, its indexing value in Google drops considerably. According to estimates, 29% of web space is made up of double content, and in many cases, it is ignored by search engines.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, if you continue to have duplicate content you will be very poorly ranked in search engine results. These losses come from two main issues:
- To give you the best experience, search engines will rarely display multiple versions of the same content, so the best result is chosen, and there is a good chance that your site will not be among those results, especially If there are legacy sites that copied the text.
- The value of the links can be further diminished because instead of multiple input links indicating a single section of content, they link to several identical pages. Because inbound links are a classification factor, this can influence your visibility in search engines.
There are several options for troubleshooting double content issues, but we mention the most commonly used:
- Determining duplicate content issues is based on the same idea, it should be specified which of the duplicate pages is the correct one. If the content on a site can be found on multiple URLs, it should be canonized (this is a way to tell search engines that a particular URL is the core version of a page.) Practically the canonical label tells the engines Search for what version of a URL you want to appear in search results).
- Another solution is to set a 301 redirect to the duplicate page on the site’s original page. When multiple pages have the potential to rank well, they are combined into one page. They create a signal of relevance, and this will have a positive impact on the page, and the right one will rank better.