Content Management Tips: The Best Ways To Handle Duplicate Content

When you are trying to understand duplicate content it isn’t simply a matter of determining what plagiarism is. Your website can get penalized if it has duplicate content on it if the content is too similar to what is on another URL. Usually, this occurs inadvertently. However, if you don’t get it fixed, your search engine rankings will drop and you could lose a lot of traffic coming to your website.

7 Ways Duplicate Content Can Be Handled

If a search engine must choose between the original content and your content, your URL won’t even be displayed in the search results. No matter how great your SEO strategy is for your website, if you don’t eliminate the duplicate content, then your efforts will all be in vain. The following are 7 ways that duplicate content can be handled.

1. Redirect Multiple Pages Over To A Single URL

A majority of duplication errors occur due to bad URLs. They are bad in terms of having multiple pages that point to the same URL that only have slight variations in their content. A 301 Redirect option can be used to point searchers to the right place and help to remove duplication content on your website.

Those duplicate pages are still there. However, searchers will be directed to the one correct page they are supposed to read. These kinds of duplicates occur simply due to how you collect the session ID cooks. One simply of handling this kind of oversight easily and quickly is to use redirects.

2. Double Check All Of Your Content

The most well known and obvious duplicate content is plagiarized content. There are some blogs that mistakenly think that stating in the introduction of their article or post that the piece of writing was entirely taken from someplace else covers them. However, it does not.

Maybe you avoided plagiarism ethically and legally but that isn’t how the search engines are going to it. You URL will end up getting shafted if the search engines have to choose between a website where the content was originally posted and your site sharing it.

Just pay a few dollars per year so that your content can be run through Copyscape or another site that is similar. It is definitely worth and when you use Copyscape it will show if someone is using your content.

3. Use The Rel=”Canonical” Tag To Alter Duplicate Content

If you operate an online retail website, then you know how hard it can be to distinguish between products that are virtually the same other than maybe color or size. You might have a website that is full of duplicate content due to having dozens of very similar products.

Unlike with a redirect, if you make just one change to the canonical tag you can fix all of your duplicate content (which may be hundreds or thousands of items). You can redirect users using the rel=canonical tag and it is a lossless time intensive compared to utilizing a 301 redirect to catch duplicate content through making your duplicate seeming pages appear to be unique from one another all at one time.

4. Make Sure Your Links All Conform

When a canonical root is used on all of your web pages this helps with eliminating duplication. All you need to do is ensure each new page that you add to your domain has a URL address conforming to your website’s domain.

5. Link Back To The Original Content

Linking back to the original content is probably the easiest way of eliminating duplicates, especially when you share content from other websites. Search engines will have to choose there appear to be different links going to the same content. So if yours isn’t the original, then yours will be dropped to ensure the links goes back to the original content. So make sure to link back to the original content so yours isn’t dropped.

6. Whenever Possible, Combine Similar Content Into A Single Page

Another problem that retailers and other web site have is when duplicates are created inadvertently by product lists. Approximately 25 percent of all content online is duplicated in some form.

It can be time-consuming to use unique content and descriptions. What you can do instead if combine pages that have similar products into a single page to improve the SEO navigation significantly.

7. Utilizes A Search Tool For Removing Duplication

Finally, there are tools you can use to help you find duplicates that appear on your website and then properly index them or remove them. Your favorite search engine will have webmaster tools that you can use.

Get Content Marketing & Management Assistance For SEO Services New York City

If you don’t have the knowledge or time to do this on your own, NYC SEO Authority is here to help you. We provide business to business (B2B) and content management services for mid-sized and small New York companies. Give us a call or contact us today so that we can assist you with dealing with the duplicate content on your website.