Although duplicate content doesn’t directly affect your website’s search engine rankings, it will affect how the search engines index your website. It’s imperative to ensure that your website can compete for the well-regarded top spot on search engines since 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
When it comes to SEO, what is duplicate content?
Several websites (URLs) house the same piece of content on the internet. This is known as duplicate content.
Why is duplicate content so common?
Duplicate content is often unknown to website owners, and it’s understandable if they aren’t aware of what causes it.
The exact page can be accessed from a variety of URLs
In order to avoid duplicate content, it is advisable to keep your URLs short and lowercase when linking to the same pages. Google considers case sensitivity when optimising URLs, which is why it is recommended to keep them short and lowercase. People don’t always keep their URLs in one-case format because they are unaware of the content duplication aspect of SEO. In addition to website analytics and URL tracking, it also applies to PPC campaign tracking using UTM tags. Both the parameters and their order in the URL can cause duplication of the same page.
Protocol differences between HTTP and HTTPS
In the same way, Google considers URL case sensitive and secure and non-secure connections, testing and staging versions of your sites provided they have the same content. There is the possibility that duplicate pages can be created for users who have websites built in a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress or CraftCMS.
A method for scraping content
The most common cause of duplicate content in eCommerce is this issue. It is common practice for manufacturers to copy and paste product description text onto their website, which hurts your SEO and is bad for business. Most business owners do not realise that scraped content such as this is not original and comes from similar sites.
Do you have a solution to this problem?
Pages that redirect to 301
There are two types of redirects: 301 redirects, which pass users permanently from one page to another, and 302 redirects, which pass users permanently from one page to another. By doing this, the HTTP vs HTTPS protocol issue for duplicated content is resolved since a user accessing HTTPS would not know they were being forwarded to HTTP.
URLs with canonical authority
Web admins can use Canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content from affecting Google results. The code tells Google that there is a preferred version of a page and that version is the correct version of the page.
Google search console
The Google search console allows users to choose their preferred domain name. However, this feature has been removed since the summer of 2019, and you must rely instead on redirects and canonical URLs to solve the problem.
Reflections at the end
Therefore, checking your site for duplicated content is essential since it is one of the leading factors in harming your SEO rankings.
You can find more information here:
https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/duplicate-content-problems/
