Understanding Duplicate Content and Effective Handling Techniques

Duplicate content, a common challenge faced by digital marketers and website owners alike, refers to content that exists in multiple locations across the web, be it within the same site or across different platforms. 

This pervasive issue extends beyond websites, encompassing various online mediums.

Identifying Duplication of Content

Identification and mitigation of duplication of content falls under Technical SEO which affects ranking of a webpage directly.

Duplicate contents manifest in several forms:

• Exact replication of content
• Very similar content with minor variations
• Variations of the same page featuring slightly modified content elements

Suppose you published blog content on your website and copied the exact content while guest posting or copied to social media or forums for content promotion, then it will potentially raise the issue of duplication of content.

Warning: Copying content from competitors and publishing it on your website with slightly modified words count as duplicated content. Avoid it.

The Risks of Duplicate Content

Duplicate content poses significant risks to SEO efforts due to its detrimental impact on search engine ranking algorithms.

Strictly speaking, Search Engines do not want to rank duplicated content or contents; to escape the confusing manoeuvring path of finding and choosing the original content, they ignore all the available contents.  Hence, this issue is a chronic pain to SEOs.

5 Key consequences of Duplicate content in SEO

Besides impacting site reputation negatively, these are the reasons why duplication of content is bad for SEO: 

1. Reduced organic traffic as non-indexed pages fail to appear in search engine results.
2. Potential manual penalties from search engines for blatant content replication.
3. Diminished indexation rates, as search engine crawl budgets are squandered on non-essential duplicates.
4. Dilution of link equity, leading to an uneven distribution of backlinks across duplicate pages.
5. Decreased ranking potential, as duplicates may overshadow original content in search results.

Common Causes of [Accidental] Duplicate Content

Several factors contribute to unintentional duplicate content creation, including:

1. Inconsistent URL management, such as:
   • Poor Management of www and non-www variationPresence of both HTTP and HTTPS protocolsPresence of both- trailing slash and non-trailing and non-trailing forward slash (/) at the end of URL.
2. Presence of Scraped or copied content from other sources.
3. Inadequate handling of desktop and mobile website versions.

Effective Duplicate Content Management

Finding, handling and fixing duplicated content issues is one of the vital parts of technical SEO. 

Technicality of managing duplicated content is simple but if not done right, it gets complicated

Duplication of content is not only created by you, sometimes your content might be scrapped and copied in different websites by your competitors or anyone. 

So willing or unwillingly content duplication should be handled and handling this is inevitable in an SEO journey.

How to find duplicated content on your website?

Finding if your website contains duplicated content is easy if you:

• Perform a Technical Audit of your site. (Use Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Site Bulb etc.)
• Monitor non-indexed pages on Google Search Console. (Duplicate content is one of the reasons for no-indexed pages)

5 ways to handle and fix duplicated content issues?

To mitigate the adverse effects of duplicated content, implement the following strategies:

1. 301 Redirect: Direct the duplicated content URLs to the source to consolidate ranking signals and prevent duplicate indexing.
2. Canonical Tag: Utilize the canonical tag to specify the preferred version of content and avoid duplication issue by guiding search engines on indexing priorities.
3. No-index Tag: Exclude low-value duplicated content pages from indexing by applying the no-index tag.
4. Consolidation of Pages: Merge similar pages into singular entities to streamline content and enhance user experience.
5. Proper Redirection: Implement appropriate redirection practices for different URL versions to centralize link equity and avert content duplation issues.

Your site has HTTP and HTTPS, and WWW and non-WWW versions of a single page. Which makes it 4 versions: 

1. http://yoursite.com
2. http://www.yoursite.com
3. https://yoursite.com
4. https://www.yoursite.com

HTTPS protocol is considered secure and is preferred by Search Engines. Hence, redirect all three versions of your webpage to either https://yoursite.com or https://www.yoursite.com to avoid issue of duplication of content.

In summary, mastering the identification and management of duplicate content is integral to maintaining a robust SEO strategy and optimizing website performance. 

By employing effective handling techniques, digital marketers can mitigate the risks associated with duplication of content and enhance their online visibility and user engagement.