Among the infinite content problems on the website, the worst one is duplicated content. This has been a real headache for over a decade. This generally refers to same content that you can find in different websites. Even the ‘big shots’ too have a really bad ache due to this. It’s really an unpleasant sight to watch when the best online marketing companies are left in vain. The thing about duplicate content is that you’ll never know till you figure it out. Mostly the copied content writers or websites gets away by the time the original content writer knows about it. You might be sitting there are wondering my websites aren’t getting views or visits, while the copied website is stealing all your visits and reputation. This usually happens with the online marketing companies though. When there are a massive number of products they tend to copy the content of one product for another product. Duplicating or copying from another websites is the worst and the most Black Hat technique being used now a day.
Keeping your contents unique and real is the key for a successful SEO. Non original content will definitely cause harm on your websites. If there are two websites with the same content Google gets confused while picking the genuine one. According to Google, it’ll only post or promote the website that it finds more knowledge for the users. By this there’s an equal chance for your website to be promoted or de-promoted. To look on the fact the 70% of the content of internet is copied or duplicated from other websites. There was this incident that took place in 2009, a company ‘jesto designers'(not the real name) found out that there is something fishy going with their data traffic as it became completely nil at a point. So this caught their attention and they were forced to do a detailed check. Later they were shocked to find out that all the traffic that they were supposed to get were redirected to a clone site of their own website. To their dismay, Google miss judged their website to be a cone one and took them off the search engine. See how much trouble a small ‘Black Hat’ technique has caused.
Now let’s discuss about the cons’ of duplicate content on your website!
Having duplicate content in your website really confuses the Google algorithm and forces them to omit one. If it’s your unlucky day be well prepared to face the consequences. Sometime you may get away with it but not always. Finding same content on your website regarding to another site can really whoop you away from the search results and can get you an easy ban too.
It confuses the viewers about the surety of the content. If the viewer’s find just the copy pasted version of content, they might start losing trust in your content. This usually happens with most of the companies too. A little duplicate content can do no harm for your website but a few might really pull out the stars on the cover of your company. This will in turn hurt your rankings as Google finds it less trustworthy.
All the best digital marketing companies have two versions for their page, one for online use and other for offline or print use. What happens sometime is that the search engine fails to figure out which of these pages are for online and are for offline use. So it might end up uploading the print version other than the online use version. The problem with this is that the one that isn’t meant for online use does not have good ranking .So what happens next is that you’ll end up at the last of the search results.
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Another problem that can occur with duplicate content is when your data is linked with third parties. If you have blogs and articles with RSS technologies search engines tends to remove the page where your blog or content was published first and instead use the new version of the same whoever is republishing. As a result searching for your website can trigger up the results of the third party pages.
You should very much expect penalties if you are considering duplicate content on your page. If the amount of duplicate content is too high the consequence can be a very huge descent in the traffic and even has a chance not to be shown in the search engine results.
Use a Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is a piece of code that has to be placed on the <head> section of your page’s HTML code. Its role is to tell a search engine which is the original version of content to display in search results.
Set the Preferred Domain
To avoid confusion within Google about the version of the domain it should display in search, set up a preferred domain to tell if your site should be shown with our without the “www” in search results.
Use 301 Redirects
Through this way of redirecting pages will no longer compete with one another in the search results. They will also retain their authority and search traffics, positively whopping up rankings of the page you redirect them to.
We can’t conclude that duplicate content can only cause harm. Everything has a certain lists. If you exceed them then it’s against the laws. As Matt said “A little duplicate content can never harm you”. But isn’t it always far better to have unique contents for your page? Write to us what you feel after reading this article, as sharing your review with the world is the best way to express your views.
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Author Bio:
Ruquiya Ansari holds a Master’s degree in Information technology. She is awarded a gold medal for being the topper in B.Sc. (IT). She is working with a software company as a SEO specialist. In her free time, she enjoys writing articles on Social Media, SEO, Blogging, Internet Marketing and Business Technology. In her personal opinion, she believes in hard work and practice.