How Duplicate Content Affects SEO & Google Ranking?

No matter why your site is being tagged for duplicate content, the fact is, it is bad for rankings. In some cases, you may have pages on your site that are dupes of each other, or in other cases, someone may have ripped off your content. To clarify, every site on the internet regardless of size is at risk of being tagged for duplicate content which can have a negative effect on your SEO rankings.

How Duplicate Content Affects SEO & Google Ranking?

If you are a blogger, or if you are managing your site content on your own, you may be confused about why duplicate content is a big no-no. We will go over why dupe content is so bad, how it affects your search engine rankings, and how to find and correct dupes when found.

What Counts As Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is pages or blocks of words on your site that are the same as those on another site. In many instances, even being similar will constitute being tagged as a duplicate. There are other types of content that may be tagged as near-duplicates or common. For example, this is when there are similar pages with only slightly different information. There is a big difference between having a duplicate on your site and having some aspects tagged as similar content. For example, when the cited quote is taken from another publication, the original content already exists on the internet, so your quote will technically be tagged as a duplicate, however, context is important.

Duplicate Content Variations

There are two main forms of duplicate content that can be found; external duplicates and internal duplicates. Duplicates that originate from within the same website, or from internal URL’s are internal dupes. On the other hand, duplicates that originate from other websites are external dupes. These are often referred to as cross-domain duplicates. In both cases, they can be tagged as near dupes or exact dupes.

How To Avoid Internal Dupes

If you have the same person producing all of the content for your site, it is easy to run into instances of unintentional internal dupes. However, you can avoid that by making sure each page has unique headings, page titles, and meta descriptions. While these may only account for a small amount of the content on your site, you would be surprised how Google site crawlers read these small areas to determine dupe content.

It may be impossible to create unique meta descriptions for each page on sites with many pages. Well, you can hire someone to do just that, but in reality, it may not be cost-effective. Google will grab bits from your content and set that as your meta description automatically when one is not specifically assigned. This is one of the main reasons it is important to have unique content, especially when you are not creating customized meta descriptions.

It is also a good idea to check your URL parameters. Though this problem usually plagues commerce sites, it can still ding your content as duplicate even if your website is not click to purchase.

How Does Duplicate Content Affect SEO?

Most websites push SEO to get ranked favorable in Google’s search rankings. Of course, being ranked on other search engines is equally important, but most SEO efforts focus on Google. Google won’t punish a page for publishing content that already exists, however, it will filter duplicate content out of their search results. In a way, this acts as a punishment since fewer hits on your content means that your pages will be ranked lower as a result. Yikes.

When there are several of the same blocks of content on the web, it confuses the search engines. Therefore, Google will have to choose which batch of content to push to the top of its search results. As a result, this means the oldest iteration of the content is not the automatic winner. Sorry guys. If you produce a well-written piece, someone else can literally copy the whole text from your site and use it to boost their rankings. In conclusion, this is one of the main reasons that being duped or using duped content is terrible for your SEO campaigns and your Google rankings.

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