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Video Summary
Have you encountered some duplicate content in the past and you got a little bit concerned that Google might somehow penalize your website?
And, even now you wonder what happens if you have something simple like titles that are similar on your site and other published content.
Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. But it’s probably a bigger problem than you know. In this video, we’ll discuss what duplicate content really means and how you can solve duplicate content issues on your website. Continue reading for more.
Video Transcript
Hey, this is Jeffrey Kirk. Today I’m talking about duplicate content and how to fix the problem on your website. So, did you hear about the two criminals who got identical camping equipment?
Yeah, they had duplicate con-tents! Haha, can you tell I made that one up? Anyway, be sure to subscribe to my channel and click the little bell so you get notified when my next video comes out.
Alright, are you ready to get started? I imagine you’re here because you heard something about duplicate content, and you might have wondered how it could affect your website.
Perhaps, you encountered some duplicate content in the past and you were a little bit concerned that Google might somehow penalize your website. And, even now you wonder what happens if you have something simple like titles that are similar on your site and other published content.
Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. But it’s probably a bigger problem than you know. In this video, we’ll discuss what duplicate content really means and how you can solve duplicate content issues on your website.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is having the exact copy or very similar content that shows in more than one location online. And this means the same content or information appears on different URLs, different pages, and it may be within a single website or across multiple sites.
According to Google, duplicate content may be “a single page that’s accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and desktop version)”.
In fact, statistics say about 29% of more than 200-million-page crawls had duplicate content. So, even though you don’t really get penalized per se for duplicate content, it is beneficial to fix it because uniqueness can improve your search ranking.
How Does Duplicate Content Affect Your SEO?
Well, duplicate content confuses site visitors and search engines. If multiple versions of your content appear online, search engines won’t know which version to index and show in the search results.
When Google indexes the pages of your website, you have a higher chance of appearing in the search results to be seen by your target audience. And if you’re not indexed, then your content is invisible, and your target audience can’t find you.
For example, I often see this with ecommerce sites that sell the same products. They get the product name, photo, and descriptions from the manufacturer and then put those into their website. If hundreds of websites carry the exact same product with the same description, which one should show up when someone does a search? It doesn’t make sense to show 200 identical search results, does it?
In reality Google only wants to rank quality pages that are unique.
Therefore, the pages that are duplicated will not show up in the search results. How will people find your website if it’s invisible? But even if Google were to display all 200 identical results, what good would it be to you if your site appeared anywhere other than the top?
In other cases, readers may have a hard time distinguishing which article is original, and this will cause trouble for your website’s credibility, authority, and trust. Did you create the content, or did you swipe it from someone else?
And finally, if you have duplicate content within the pages of your own site, this can be a problem if Google sees them all as separate. Likewise, you could get links coming into your pages from outside websites and you end up with links to different pages that have the same content.
While these incoming links are normally great, they aren’t in this case because they dilute the effectiveness of all the duplicate pages. So, instead of your original content receiving all the traffic and ranking higher in the search results, all the versions end up competing with each other causing lower performance for all of them. And that doesn’t help you either.
All this means is that duplicate content has the tendency to push your page down in the search results, and that’s the exact opposite of what you want.
How Does Duplicate Content Happen?
Most of the time when thinking about duplicate content, people think of the sinister side, like copying content from another site. And well, sometimes, that is true. Therefore, you think if you have never copied anything from another site, you don’t have to worry about duplicate content.
It would be nice if that were the case, but it’s not. You can easily end up with duplicate content by accident.
Example #1 – HTTP vs HTTPS and WWW vs Non-WWW pages
The type of duplicate content I see most often is caused by duplicate versions of the same website. For example, if your website has been around for many years, it may have once had an address that started with http:// but now it starts with httpS://
Having a safe and secure website provides a better user experience. And if you haven’t done so, you really want to install an SSL Certificate to add security to your website and enable the use of HTTPS.
But the problem comes when a website continues to use the old version and the new version. If you type in the HTTP address of your site on one browser and HTTPS in another browser and the first shows without the secure lock while the second version comes up with the secure lock, then you have duplicate content.
The same is true if your website answers to both a www version and a non-www version. These are different and thus duplicate content is born. With the combination of the Ws and non‑w version, the http and the s version, you could end up with 4 possible duplicate versions of your website and not even know it.
Your web site hosting company should be able to fix this for you. And sometimes you can even clean it up yourself if you use a platform like WordPress.
Example #2 — Having Multiple URLs
A great example would be if you own an ecommerce site, and you decide to host a sale on your website and you create new pages for the sale.
Your original listing URL could be newjeans.com/faded-jeans but since you decided to consolidate all sale items in a new page, the listing is now also available in a new link in the sale category, for example, newjeans.com/sale/faded-jeans
Since both URLs have the same product information, title, and images… it is duplicate content. The same thing can happen if your website creates multiple URLs when you assign your article to different categories.
For example, your original listing URL could be newjeans.com/faded-jeans but you also assigned it to the category “everyday wear”. And so, a new URL is created automatically on your site assigning the duplicate to that page newjeans.com/everydaywear/faded-jeans.
Another innocent form of duplicate content pops up if you have a print-only version of a page. It’s the same content, just formatted differently. Using the same example, you might have the original page at newjeans.com/faded-jeans while the print-only version is at newjeans.com/print/faded-jeans.
Example #3 — Supporting Multiple Device Types
Your website could have a separate URL for mobile devices. This was very common as a practice for a while, though it’s not so common anymore except with the older sites.
Here the example might be newjeans.com/bluejeans and m.newjeans.com/bluejeans. In this case the leading m is like www but stands for mobile.
In order to avoid this, make sure your website is mobile friendly by being responsive. That way the same content appears good on both desktop and mobile platforms. When it’s responsive, your website shows the same content and information across all platforms. It just shows it differently based on screen size.
Having a responsive design also means having the same URL across all devices whether desktop, tablet, or mobile phone. And that means different versions of the URL like m.website.com can go away. In separate videos, I talk about how to make your site mobile friendly and why it’s important. I will include link here so you could check it out too.
Example #4 — Syndicated Content
According to Google, this happens “If content you provide on a blog for syndication to other sites is replicated in part or in full on those domains”. The same information may appear in multiple URLs across the internet causing duplicate content.
This is what happens in the ecommerce example I provided earlier. But it also happens in service businesses. For example, an accounting firm may subscribe to financial articles they can publish on their website. This saves them time and allows them to publish blog posts regularly which is a good thing.
The problem is that all of these accounting firms have the same articles so they are syndicating duplicate content on a massive scale. Not all of those accountants are going to get their pages in the search results. The solution to this one is simple. Use the syndicated content as a draft and rewrite it. You still save time over creating from scratch, but you create unique content that can be indexed.
Doing this solves most duplicate content issues that happen across sites. So now that you know that duplicate content is an issue, and it can happen quite innocently…
How Do You Solve Duplicate Content Issues Within Your Site?
To fix many of these issues, you have to identify which page is the original content. Then help the search engines know to index it properly. So how do we do this? Google says we should identify which URL is canonical.
That’s one word, four syllables… can-on-i-cal!
In an article by Google, a canonical URL is the page that is the most complete and has the best quality. By Google’s definition “A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site”.
In other words the canonical page will be considered high-priority and will be indexed more frequently than the duplicates. And doing so will give you a higher chance to show and rank in the search results. Having a canonical URL also helps you manage your URLs and choose a specific one that you want your traffic to go to.
If you do nothing, Google will choose which page it believes is canonical. But you can, and should, override that to make sure the page you want indexed is the one that is. There are several ways to specify your preferred canonical page…
#1 is use a 301 Redirect
You can use a 301 redirect from your duplicate page to the original page to show Google which is the better version. This method is best used when you want to get rid of duplicate pages permanently since the 301 means the page has been moved to a new location.
So, if you have a page that used to have one URL, but at some point you created a newer version of that page, a 301 redirect is the perfect solution.
Using a 301 redirect will help your page rank higher since Google will only crawl and index the final version, the page that results after the redirect. And Google will even change all references to the old page in the index to the new page. That’s cool.
#2 is Rel=canonical
Use this method to tell the search engines that you know this is a duplicate page, you want to keep this page because it serves a purpose, but you only want the proper canonical page to be listed in the search results. You don’t want it to compete with others.
If a page is a duplicate, add the rel=“canonical” link tag in the head HTML section of all duplicate pages and point to the canonical page. For example, in the newjeans.com/everydaywear/bluejeans page you could have a line like this: link rel=“canonical” href= and then the proper original page.
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://newjeans.com/bluejeans” />
This method tells the search engines that this search page is the duplicate and the URL shown should be prioritized for indexing.
#3 is Sitemaps
Sitemaps help search engines crawl existing pages in your website. It’s like a roadmap that lists all your important web pages so Google can find them easily. So instead of search engines going through all the internal links to reach all of your content, sitemaps make it easier and faster for crawlers to index your site.
If you use a sitemap, do not include the duplicate pages in the sitemap. Only canonical URLs belong in the sitemap.
Now that you know more about duplicate content, take a look at your site to see if you have duplicate content issues. Do what you can to get these problems resolved so that you get better search rankings and more credibility with your website. It is worth the effort.
I have more information about duplicate content, 301 redirects, and canonicals in my book Dominate The Top: Simple Website Fixes To Rise In The Search Results and Crush Your Competition. Head on over to dominatethetop.com to get your free copy.
Your business deserves to be seen online, and I will help you get there.
Thanks for watching and have a great day!
