Want to know easy steps to identify and resolve duplicate content issues?
Duplicate content issues are a common occurrence. No matter how careful you are when creating content, it’s difficult to prevent duplication.
You may not encounter such issues when getting started. However, as your website grows and you have hundreds of pages, the likelihood of content duplication increases drastically.
These issues occur when two or more of your pages end up being identical or having massive similarities.
There can be a number of things that may lead to content duplication, and we will help you explore them.
Furthermore, we will also talk about the impact of content duplication on your search engine performance and how it affects your online visibility.
This article showcases a few easy steps through which you can effectively identify and resolve duplicate content issues.
So, without further ado, let’s start.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content represents a page of your website that is either a replica or contains content similar to other pages.
Duplicate content affects the user experience and compromises information accessibility for your visitors.
It can also affect your search engine visibility, which has a negative impact on your ability to generate traction organically.
There are a number of things that can cause duplicate content. But before diving into that, let’s explore how duplicate content affects your search engine performance.
Impact of Duplicate Content on Search Engine Performance
Search engines facilitate 93% of online experiences. Think about it. What’s the first thing you do when you want to learn about something new? Odds are, you turn to Google.
People use certain keywords to explore useful information. Your goal as a business is to optimize your content using relevant keywords to attract the right people and drive traffic to your website.
Now, what happens when you have duplicate content on your website? In this case, the content on multiple pages targets the same keywords. So, they end up competing with one another.
As a result, search engines find it difficult to identify and recommend relevant pages to users in response to their respective queries.
As a result, search engine giants like Google may decide not to display your pages among the top recommendations, which may severely affect your ability to drive organic traffic.
In some cases, you may end up facing a penalty from search engines. It may be a rare occurrence. But considering the severity of the situation, you can’t just ignore it.
When you receive a penalty from Google, the search engine will deindex your entire website. It means that none of your pages will appear in the SERPs.
So, it’s best to identify duplicate content issues on your website and resolve them to improve your search engine visibility.
What Causes Duplicate Content?
There may be a number of reasons you may encounter duplicate content issues on your website. However, we will discuss the most common causes that lead to this problem.
1. URL Variation
URL variation is one of the most common causes of duplicate content issues. This happens when visitors can access the same information published on your site through different URLs.
URL variation may occur due to case-sensitive slugs, trailing slash, the use of session IDs, the implementation of parameter-based URLs, and more.
2. Content Categorization
Content tagging and categorization may also lead to duplication issues. You may end up generating different URLs for the same piece of content.
For example, you have a page associated with two different categories. You may end up having two different URLs that may lead to the same information.
As a result, you may end up facing duplicate content issues due to content categorization or tagging.
3. Regional Targeting
Content duplication may also occur due to flaws in your content strategy or poor execution. If you’re not careful, you may end up covering the same topic twice on your website, which may lead to adverse consequences.
Another mistake many make is intentionally creating duplicate pages and changing the slugs, thinking it’s a decent strategy to target visitors from different regions.
For example, creating identical landing pages targeting different regions like www.example.com/us/meeting-software and www.example.com/ca/meeting-software may end up doing more harm than good.
4. Content Syndication
It’s the process in which you publish the content that you own on third-party platforms. It serves as an opportunity to amplify your reach and generate traction through relevant platforms.
The only downside is that, if not done right, content syndication may cause duplicate content issues and end up leading to negative consequences.
5. Content Repurposing
Content repurposing refers to the process of not creating content from scratch but leveraging information published on other websites to fuel your content output.
Here, content creators either make some changes themselves or leverage AI-powered tools to do so. If you’re not careful, you may end up publishing plagiarized content. Not only can it lead to duplicate content issues, but it may also cause copyright violations.
6. HTTP and HTTPS Variation
When your visitors can access your website through different transfer protocols, you may come across duplication issues. Search engines may consider both versions of your page as separate entities, leading you to acknowledge a drop in organic traction.
How to Identify Duplicate Content Issues
Now that we have covered the causes of duplicate content, let’s talk about how you can identify these issues.
1. Conduct a Website Audit
It’s essential to conduct a website audit on a periodic basis to identify duplicate content issues and come up with viable fixes.
Even if you’re careful, content duplication is inevitable, especially when you have a website with hundreds of pages.
There’s a possibility that you may run into these issues over time. So, auditing your website from time to time is highly recommended.
You can assess all your pages manually, which may take a lot of time and is a daunting activity. So, it’s best to leverage website audit tools for the task. These tools will crawl your site and help you identify the problem areas that need your attention.
2. Review Page Titles and Descriptions
Website audits are a great way to get the necessary insights you need to deal with content duplication issues. However, you shouldn’t stop there. You should review the page titles and descriptions for your website’s pages.
Titles and descriptions give users a glimpse of information published on respective pages. So, reviewing them may help you identify pages with potential duplication issues.
3. Check URL Slugs
Once you have reviewed the titles and descriptions of your pages, move on to checking the URL slugs.
URL variation is one of the major causes of duplicate content issues. Even the slightest variation in your URL structure may end up having a devastating impact.
So, it’s best to check your URL slugs and see if you have accidentally created multiple URL slugs for the same page.
How to Resolve Duplicate Content Issues
Now, let’s discuss a few of the effective ways through which you can resolve duplicate content issues on your website.
1. Check Plagiarism
Consider plagiarism checking a prerequisite for publishing your content. It’s the preliminary step that enables you to publish quality content and minimize the likelihood of content duplication.
Even when you create content from scratch, it may still contain plagiarism. Your thoughts and the way you convey the information may be similar to someone else’s, causing you to publish plagiarized content.
The best way to check plagiarism is to leverage plagiarism finder tools. These tools will instantly scan thousands of web pages and highlight similar areas in your content.
Once the scan is complete, simply rephrase the highlighted parts in your content and publish it on your website.
It goes without saying that you should never publish plagiarized content on your website. Not only does it affect your reputation and search engine performance, but it may also lead to copyright infringement issues.
2. Go for Consolidation
Consolidation is one of the most effective ways to deal with content duplication when caused by identical pages on your website. Here, you combine similar or identical pages into one, creating a unique and detailed piece of content.
Climbing the SERPs is not that easy. You have to be the best among the hundreds of pages sharing more or less the same information.
The key to achieving high rankings is to generate content that offers value and caters to the topical depth. Consolidation not only helps you cater to content duplication issues but also enables you to create authoritative content.
3. Consider Page Deletion
Consolidation may be an effective way to deal with content duplication. But what if the duplicate pages don’t offer much value?
The information published on duplicate pages on your website may be either obsolete or irrelevant. In this case, the best course of action is to delete the pages entirely and just keep the one that is capable of attracting a relevant audience.
4. Add Canonical Tags
This method serves as an excellent way to deal with content duplication issues when you have created duplicate pages. As said earlier, you may consider targeting different regions through multiple variations of the same page.
In such cases, the use of canonical tags may help. You add these tags either to the HTML code or the HTTP header of duplicate pages and specify the original page.
This tells search engines that a particular page is a replica of the original specified. This fixes potential duplication issues and prevents duplicate pages from affecting the ranking of the original one.
5. No Indexing
Another effective way to deal with content duplication issues when you create different versions of the same page to attract diverse audience segments is no-indexing.
Here, you ask search engines not to index certain pages of your website. Your visitors will be able to access these pages effortlessly and directly through your website. However, the specified pages will not appear in the SERPs.
Through no indexing, you prevent search engines from crawling your duplicate pages and save yourself from potential problems.
6. Set Redirects
Setting redirects is an excellent way to deal with content duplication and prevent it from affecting your search engine rankings.
Here, you set redirects on all duplicate versions of a particular page, routing the traffic to the original. Redirects also help you prevent the loss of traffic caused by content consolidation or page deletion.
Your visitors will be redirected to the specified page even after you have removed the ones they chose to visit. So you will be able to cater to content duplication issues without losing traffic to duplicate pages.
Over to You
Content duplication is inevitable. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in a position where you have to identify and resolve duplicate content.
If you don’t pay attention, duplicate content issues may have a devastating impact on your reputation and search engine performance.
Not only do they affect the user experience you offer, but they also have a significant impact on your search engine rankings.
In this article, we discussed the noteworthy causes of content duplication. We also covered the steps through which you can identify such issues and recommended ways to resolve them.
The strategies we recommended will help you create and maintain engaging, unique content on your website.
