What Content is considered duplicate?
When content appears on more that one URL, such content is deemed as Content Duplicate. Duplicate content is not a crime, but your content can be emitted out of search results. This is because Google will approve only one version of the piece of the content as acceptable, without showing the rest.
Why is Duplicate Content a Problem?
Google finds it difficult to clarify what version of the content is best concerned with a question, if there are similar versions of the same content. For instance, when one or more versions of a particular content pop up on URL A and URL B, it becomes a problem. The search engine will not show both because google intends that all search results to be distinctively relevant. A version of the content will be chosen while the others will only serve to be trivial and irrelevant on the site.
If you have ever come across this before, it’s a decent illustration of Google “filtering ” contents it views as repetitive, supplemental, and a non-preferred edition of that specific content resource.
You do not want to stake the odds of Google picking your non-preferred version if you have content that’s placed in more than one location, so you should implement a rel=cannonical tag to infer to google which of the content version is included in the index.
Fixing Internally Duplicate Content
There are 3 options for fixing internally duplicate content
1. Keep a version of the content, discard the others and 301 divert them to the version you kept- as long as you don’t require the content to be placed in multiple places on your site, this is a great option.
2. Ensure all versions of the content are kept but add a rel=canonical tag on all the non-preferred ones. This a good option also as long as you require to have a page be accessed at multiple locations on your site.
3. You can equally have the version of your content rewritten, this way, the versions sharing content all become unique- When you need all your pages indexed and you have time to construct unique content for each of them, one can proceed to use this option.
Rather than end up with similar pages from which Google had to decide between, you will end up with 1 strong page.
Addressing Cross-Domain Duplicate Content
If you have content on your site that’s similar to that of another website’s content, should you have it written again or do you leave it, have it deleted or something else?
Google’s stance on Duplicate Content: ” Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results”
If you find out that content(s) on your site has been stolen and used another website, it is a violation of Google’s quality guidelines. The sites that do could be given a manual penalty. Should the content on the site be taken without permission from you, there are two options I suggest to pursue this order:
• Contact the site’s owner, asking for the content to be removed, and if this doesn’t work,
• File a DCMA notice: this should only be used in extreme cases that you are 100% certain your content is the original, and a vast sum of it has been stolen(an entire important page or a scraping of numerous pages) and you have made an attempt to speak with the site owner.
Google asserts that it performs a reasonably decent job of picking which version of the content to display in search results on its own, so before you take drastic actions, search a fraction of the copied page’s content in Google to see if it’s your version that comes up or that of the scraper’s.
A note on syndication and Duplicate Content:
Legitimately licensed contents are not deemed as “duplicate” by Google. For example, articles published by news sites from The Associated Press are not scraping. Nevertheless, a rel=canonical should be used by sites that syndicate, this way they can indicate the original source of the article.
Citing Content and “Public Domain” Content:
The blockquote tag in the HTML of your content can be used to cite the source you’re quoting instead of writing something that is best as-is. A specific situation for this case could be the employing the blockquote tag to accommodate laws/statutes literally in the same words on a client’s page.
Also, other content can be regarded as “public domain” without the need to be rewritten or noted at all. One good example is a definition- no one owns it, and you can safely use it as-is within the content of your page.
manufacturer-Required Duplicate Content
For commercial businesses involved in the selling, muting, and recommendation of certain products can get in bed in duplicate content as a result of the fact that manufacturers need those businesses to utilize certain descriptions on their websites.
This applies to award and association content (an example is Super lawyers need award recipients to make use of certain languages when announcing the honour), disclaimers, and some other legally-required language.
For my websites, is manufacturer-required duplicate content wrong? Naturally, manufacturers specs don’t make up the lion’s share of the web page, this means that there are some other things that help make the page unique, an example is product reviews. One example of a high-quality e-commerce page in Google’s quality rater is a page that uses the manufacture’s product specs. According to Google, it was good because it used this content, whereas most SEO’s might be worried that might not like it, as a result, out being shared across other retailers who carry the product
If you think you might be abusing or harming site performance, and this makes you worried, here are some options:
1. Enhance the ratio of unique to non-unique content: In the event in which you are required to use a specific product or association, you could opt to develop a ton of uniquely valuable content to support it. That way, the page doesn’t entirely encompass the duplicate content that can be found in lots of other places on the web. ( This is a good option for a similar content that has live on vital or important pages.)
2. Make use of an iframe to show the non-unique content: you may be instructed to show a certain product illustration on your website, but they probably do not care if the content is stored in your site’s HTML or being pulled from the primary source. (It’s more difficult to control the way content on Iframes look, so a lot of sites do prefer this option. It could look like this: <iframe src=”domain.com” height=”200″ width=”300″></iframe> )
3. Nolndex the pages: If the manufacturer requires contents that don’t exist on the pages, you are trying to rank, you could Nolndex the pages. (This option is good when a similar content or duplicate content exists on pages where ranking for a keyword is not desired
