Editorial Staff
Having a duplicate content across your website can cause a SEO problem in which the search engine don’t know which one to show in the SERP.
This will hurt the page ranking and the backlink acquired will be split among duplicate content.
In this module, you’ll learn about the various causes of duplicate content and how to solve them accordingly.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is the content that appears on the internet in more than one URL or page.
The content doesn’t necessarily to be the same, but if it has high similarity, it will consider as duplicate.
Duplicate content can happen in two conditions:
- Externally: This happen when two or more different websites has high similarity or same content.
- Internally: This happen when there are high similarity or same content within the same site.
While you basically have no control on what happen externally, we will focus more on solving the internal duplicate content.
Why Duplicate Content is Bad for SEO?
Duplicate content hurt ranking.
When the search engine found two or more content with the same content, it cause confusion on which one to show to their user.
As the result, the search engine will demote both of the pages and the worst case is getting penalized.
From the website visitor’s perspective, a duplicate content will cause confusion as they have no idea which is the right thing for them.
What Cause Duplicate Content?
The most common thing when anyone heard the word “duplicate”, they will think it is caused by copying and pasting the same content.
However, in fact, most of the duplicate content issue are coming from the technical issue of the website.
Unless, the webmaster is intentionally cloned a post and publish it accidentally.
Content Management System
Let’s say your article about ‘content-a’ appears at http://www.website.com/content-a/ and the same content also appears at http://www.website.com/article/content-a/.
This situation happen a lot in the modern content management system (CMS).
From the webmaster perspective, they will see it as one unique content. However, the way the search engine sees a unique content is according to the unique URL.
URL Parameters
If the site’s URL parameters settings do not change the content of page such as tracking link, it can cause duplicate content problem.
For instance, http://www.website.com/content-a/ and http://www.website.com/content-a/?source=rss are not the same URL in the search engine’s eye.
This tracking link might be useful for you to track the source visitor come from, but in the same time has the unwanted side effect.
Comment Pagination
Be careful when you created a pagination on anything on your content.
The most common one is comment pagination.
When you created the comment pagination, it automatically created multiple URL such as: http://www.website.com/content-a/comment-page-1 and http://www.website.com/content-a/comment-page-2.
While everything the same except the comment section, the search engine will identify these pages as duplicate.
How to Fix Duplicate Content Issue?
Fixing duplicate content issue will come down to the same ideas: specifying to the search engine which content is the one.
1. Identify Duplicate Content Issue
Identifying duplicate content could be tricky since most of the times the webmasters are not aware if they have it on their site.
To check, you can use search operators in the search engine.
For example, if you want to know whether you have duplicate content against the keyword “cooking powder”, you can type below on the search engine:
site:website.com intitle:”cooking powder”
Google then will show all pages that contain “cooking powder” that belong to your site.
2. Use Canonical Tag
Canonical tag or what known as “rel canonical” is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.
To set canonical tag, simply just by adding it in the <head> section of the page.
Let’s say you have two duplicate: http://www.website.com/content-a/ and http://www.website.com/content-a/?source=rss – and you decided to put the first one as your main.
So, you can put the canonical tag on the main page like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.website.com/content-a/” />
This way, both URL will be merged into one in front of the search engine’s eye.
3. Merge The Duplicate Content
If you find the content are pretty much the same, combined both article is a good idea.
There is no point of keeping both content on the separated page since Google will end up demote their rank.
Choose one page as the main, and merge the other to the main page.
Don’t forget to use the canonical tag in the main too.
Ready to Fix Your Duplicate Content?
Believe it or not, duplicate content appear everywhere.
It is something that the webmaster should keep an eye on from time to time.
You might have fixed the duplicate content issue now, but it could happen again in the future with or without you realize it.
