Duplicate content can harm your website’s search rankings and credibility. Unfortunately, it’s also something that can easily go undetected.
When multiple versions of the same content exist, search engines can struggle to understand which is most relevant to display to their users. While they often choose the correct version, there’s always a chance they can get it wrong.
You could also be in a position where your website has no chance of being visible in the search engines as you’re using the same content as other businesses. This is particularly true for E-Commerce websites that use product descriptions provided by suppliers and manufacturers.
In this blog post, we’ll explain how you can find duplicate content issues on your website and how to fix them.
How to find duplicate content issues:
- SEO Tool – To use SEO tools like SEMrush or Moz, start by creating an account and logging in. Both platforms offer a dashboard where you can enter the URL of your website and analyse its performance. Regularly monitor your site’s performance and make adjustments based on the data provided by these tools to improve your SEO efforts and increase your website’s visibility in search engine results.
- Google Search Console – Log in to your Google Search Console account and select the property for the website you want to analyse. Go to the “Coverage” report under the “Index” section to see if there are any duplicate content issues flagged. Here, you can identify specific URLs that have duplicate content and take action to resolve the issue. Additionally, you can use the URL Inspection tool to check individual pages for duplicate content by entering the URL of the page you want to analyse. Google Search Console will highlight any duplicate content or similar pages that may be impacting your website’s search visibility. By addressing these duplicate content issues, you can improve your website’s SEO performance and ensure that search engines properly index and rank your content.
Fixing duplicate content issues:
- 301 redirect – When you have duplicate content that is no longer needed, the best option is to delete the page and redirect traffic to the original content page. A 301 redirect can be used, which is a signal to search engines that the redirect is permanent. The redirect can be set up using SEO settings or an SEO plugin inside your website.
- Create new content – If you’ve accidentally duplicated content, as per the example of an E-Commerce website using manufacturer’s product descriptions, you should create new content. Any new content you create should be unique and substantially different.
- Canonical attribute – Where duplicate content is necessary and should stay on your website, you should utilise a canonical tag. This is an HTML attribute that lets search engines know the original source of your content. Any page that isn’t the original source is treated as a copy, so search engines should avoid highlighting it in search results. Canonical tags can be added using SEO settings or an SEO plugin inside your website.
- Noindex, Follow – Sometimes, duplicate content exists due to pagination or category issues. For example, when a user clicks to view a second page of results or sorts a list of products by attributes like colour and weight. The tag looks like this: content=”noindex,follow”. When you use this tag, you’re telling search engines not to index the content but still allowing them to crawl it, per their best practice recommendations.
- Link consistency – When you’re linking to other pages on your website, known as internal linking, ensure you always use the correct format of your domain. For example, if your website uses “www”, ensure every link uses this format. Fix any links that have been added incorrectly.
- Protect against scrapers – There are situations where your content may be scraped by less scrupulous internet users. You can protect against content scraping by including a self-canonical tag for each page on your website. For example, if you use WordPress, the SEOPress plugin will apply self-canonical tags to each of your posts and pages.