Duplicate Content in SEO: Detection and Prevention Techniques
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Duplicate content in SEO is an old issue. Yet you can still find a lot of websites that experience problems with duplicate content issues. These issues have implications for your Google ranking. This article will show you how to discover, solve, and prevent duplicate content issues both within and outside of your website.
While duplicate content issues will not directly cause a Google ranking penalty, they have other consequences.
First, if you have content that is duplicated, Google may rank according to which page it believes is original and authoritative (determined by its algorithm). This might not be the correct page, or the page you would expect to rank. If that happens, the wrong URLs will show up in the search results. You might have already observed this in one of your websites.
Second, having lots of duplicate content on a website can make it inefficient for crawlers such as Googlebot to find unique content. Unique content, remember, has a positive effect on your website's ranking. Googlebot might not revisit your website often if you have lots of duplicate content.
Third, duplicate content can dramatically increase the crawlable URLs of your website. Since there are a lot of bots that will crawl your content (e.g. Googlebot), this can eat up a significant portion of your website's bandwidth and slow it down.
Fourth, your customers might have a problem understanding your website's content if most of its pages are very similar to each other. This will decrease the value of your website in terms of uniqueness and clarity.
Fifth, cases of severe manipulation, such as building doorway pages (which is against Google's quality guidelines), can lead to your site being banned in Google.
Sixth, many of the same issues can crop up with duplicate content outside of your website. Though most of the time you cannot prevent this from happening, you must take action if someone has copied your content without your permission, because that is against copyright law.
Finally, if you are just building several domains and copying/syndicating content from other websites, you will not get positive ranking results in Google. This approach, incidentally, is also against search engine guidelines.
This article will aim to establish techniques to detect duplicate content and also suggest some general ways to prevent it.
There are two types of duplicate content issues. Internal duplicate content can be found within your website. External duplicate content, on the other hand, can be found outside your domain.
Let's deal first with the type you can control, namely internal duplicate content.
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