With the rise in copywriting and digital content, Plagiarism has risen as one of the primary hindrances. Any Duplicate content affects the SEO strategies and thus affects your ranking despite efforts. The world’s number one search engine, Google, although it is yet to formulate ways to penalize duplicacy, discourages Plagiarism.
Google has described these contents as a complete match or ‘appreciably similar’, found across domains. Thus, this classifies duplicate content into two- One being the same content in a singular domain and another being similar content across various domains.
Now you might be wondering if duplicate content really exists? Let me burst the bubble. As per the study done in 2015 by Raven, 29% of all of the pages crawled by the tool included duplicate content. Shocking, isn’t it?
So to avoid this blunder, here are 6 ways to tackle duplicate content issues-
Use Plagiarism checking tools
There are hundreds of ways to identify duplicate content issues. However, if you hate doing it all manually, using a free duplicate content checker is one of the best practices in dealing with this hindrance. If you are in a situation wherein some other spam site has stolen your content, and it might negatively affect your website traffic, try your best to contact the site and ask them to remove the plagiarized content. There are grounds for you to report the violation of copyright laws. You must act on it to ensure a secure authority of your website on the internet.
Normally, a Google Console notifies you of duplicacy, and various other tools also help with the diagnostics. A similarity in one or any can be easily tracked from URLs to page titles to Meta descriptions.
Curate your own domain
Although it might initially not seem like a huge deal, domain mix-ups can have a grave impact on your website. It doesn’t matter whether you use a www in your URL, but SERPs often show one, ignoring the original content. Thus choose your domain as per your preference and set it to that.
Various search engines require various different optimizations to ensure that. For instance, you can use the Google Search Console for Google rankings, but for everything else, the website setting has to be changed to fit the needs. In case of a lack of expertise in this, you can seek the help of a professional webmaster as well.
Robust and Original Content
To make your website an entity in itself, one must ensure that only strong and original content goes into it. But sometimes, when you’re focused on selling third-party amenities, the same content may be present on multiple websites.
To stand out from this crowd, create your content and give your website the due personalization that will set you apart. Clearly voice your brand message through original content. Seek professional help if you feel that updating and replacing the content will be tedious and time-consuming.
Best practices in Content Syndication
Your website might be the creator of content or the syndicate publisher, but in the absence of ethical considerations, it can face the aftermath of content duplicacy. Practices such as giving credits to the original source with rel=canonical tags are expected. If you’re a publisher, ensure that your syndication partner follows these guidelines heartily.
Engage redirects in your content
Include redirects in your website to avoid accidental content duplicacy. In case it is problematic for your website to avoid creating incorrect URLs, implement the 301 redirects. To put it simply, you will be directing your wrong links towards the right ones. Seek professional help from experienced web developers if necessary.
If your website has multiple options, encash them effectively. Test for any broken links and ensure that the redirecting process runs smoothly. If a broken link goes unchecked, it doesn’t serve the intended purpose of the 301 redirects.
Add links to Canonical Versions
If the search results in any search engine identify the same content as two distinct ones, it might be posed as duplicate content. This is not necessarily a case of content duplicacy but rather more likely an error that gives it such an illusion.
Link the content to the Canonical versions to avoid this issue. Just like giving credit to a primary creator, add a rel=canonical tag to credit the primary link. You can also use various tools to curate the parameters, such as the Google webmaster.
Conclusion
Content takes a lot of effort, especially when it is strategic in nature, such as keyword research, digital marketing, and various other optimization parameters. So don’t miss out on the desired website traffic due to unintentional content duplicacy.
Various tools are available to check Plagiarism and other URL duplicacy or even to redirect the URL links. The best practices are to be implemented and ensured when dealing with third-party organs. Don’t let duplicate content drive your audience towards your competitors. Please seek professional help when necessary, and the above-listed points will help you tackle duplicate content and the various woes that come with it.
