Whilst many site owners are trying to grow their traffic, they may not know that duplicate content is silently hurting their website’s performance without them even realizing it. Duplicate content is where you have exact or near-identical content appearing on more than one webpage. But why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO?
SEO is perhaps the most important tool when it comes to growing your site. That’s why it’s so important to understand the impact duplicate content can have on your rankings, what it looks like, and how to avoid it.
The Negative Impact of Duplicate Content on SEO
The negative impact of duplicate content on SEO can be surprisingly significant. Let’s answer the question of why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO, and the impact it can have on your site.
Confusion for Search Engines
Firstly, duplicate content can cause confusion for search engines. This is because search engines like Google have to decide which version of the duplicate content they want to rank. This means that you’re diluting your ranking power across multiple pages, instead of having one showing up as your main page for that topic.
Lowered Page Authority
When multiple pages contain similar content, your page authority may become spread too thinly. This means that, instead of having one page that proves that you’re the expert in the topic, this is then spread over multiple different locations. This could cause those individual pages to fail to rank as highly as they could. Lack of site authority is a big hindrance to small businesses in particular and is crucial to avoid.
Reduced Crawl Efficiency
It takes time for crawlers to analyise your site. When you have multiple versions of the same content, crawlers waste valuable time going over different pages with the same information. This can result in lower visibility for other important pages on your site that may need crawling.
Risk of Being Penalized
Not only does duplicate content not help your SEO, it can actively harm it. In a move to try and stop site owners spamming and clogging up search results with their content, Google made the decision to penalize sites that contain duplicate content. This means you could face setbacks if you have duplicate content on your site.
How Duplicate Content Affects User Experience
Not only does duplicate content affect how you’re treated by search engines, but it can also affect your users’ experience.
Frustrated Users
If visitors come across the same content on multiple pages, that can cause them to feel frustrated and feel that your site is unhelpful. This can cause them to experience lower user satisfaction and decide to leave your site more quickly.
Decreased Engagement
Users are far less likely to engage with or share content that feels repetitive. It is seen as lower value and disingenuous. This means that your interactions for your site will be down, which will negatively impact rankings.
Overall, making sure users have a positive experience is one of the most important things to ensure your site’s success, as this will be the thing that keeps them coming back and indirectly boosting your SEO performance.
Types of Duplicate Content
So, what exactly counts as duplicate content? There are a few different types of duplicate content to be aware of.
Exact Duplicate Content
This is exactly what it sounds like – content copied exactly from one page to the other. It is literally a duplicate with no differences between the two pages at all.
Near-Duplicate Content
Near-duplicate content is when you have pages with very similar content but with slight variations. For instance, this may be product descriptions and blog posts containing the same information but worded differently. Despite not being exactly the same, this is still treated as duplicate content.
Content Scraping
Content scraping is when other websites copy your content and post it without permission. This is plagarism and therefore considered duplicate content.
URL-Based Duplicate Content.
Multiple URLS leading to the same content also count as duplicate content, as Google will attempt to crawl each URL and end up cataloging the information as identical
How to Identify Duplicate Content on Your Website
Now you know what duplicate content is, you need to be able to identify it on your site. Here are some of the best tools you can use to achieve this.
Google Search Console
Google Search Control is able to identify duplicate pages by flagging them in the index. When you view your pages, look for those marked as duplicate by the console so you can easily identify where you need to delete content or make changes.
Plagiarism Checkers
There are a number of different plagiarism checkers online that you can use to identify duplicate content. These will scan the web to identify any duplicate content external to your site.
SEO Auditing Tools
Many SEO auditing tools are able to scan your site and spot duplicate content so that you can deal with it efficiently. Alternative, you can request a free SEO audit, so that an expert can review your site and give comprehensive feedback on the duplicate content found on your site.
How to Avoid Duplicate Content Moving Forward
Now you know why having duplicate content is an issue for SEO, and how to identify duplicate content, we want to make sure it doesn’t become an issue for your site in the future.
Create Unique Content
Going forward, make sure that all content posted to your site is unique and high quality, targeting a variety of different keywords across your site. This will ensure that you will not add any more duplicate content to your site.
Content Distribution Strategy
When distributing and repurposing your content for different platforms, such as on social media or other site hosting platforms, make sure that the content is adjusted for the platform and always includes a link back to where the original content was posted.
Regular Site Audits
Make sure to conduct a regular site audit so that you can keep on top of your content and prevent any duplicates from popping up in future.
Why Should You Work With SEO Baguette?
At SEO Baguette, we can use our knowledge and expertise of SEO best practices to help you get on top of your duplicate content. While you may understand why having duplicate content is an issue for SEO, it’s another matter entirely to properly manage it’s effects and get your site working at optimum capacity.
We can offer you a free SEO audit to show you where duplicate content is popping up on your site. We can then offer SEO strategies to help remove that content from your site, as well as content creation services to help you create brand new non-duplicate, SEO rich content that will allow your site to grow effectively.
With our help, duplicate content no longer needs to hold you back from your business goals.
