Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content Fixes for SEO

Find out about common duplicate content issues and how to avoid them on your website.

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Having unique content on your site, unpublished anywhere else on the web, is a valuable search engine optimisation technique for improving rankings. In this resource we take a look into how content duplication can affect your SEO, and how to deal with it.

Unique Content
For the best search engine optimisation, ideally every update, news piece and article on your website will be exclusive to your site, not published elsewhere on the web. Copying content from other websites and republishing it on your site can prevent your search engine ranks from increasing, because search engines like to present searchers with unique content from the original source. Have you got some information from another web source that you'd like to share on your website, but are afraid that republishing it might harm your ranks? You can use a piece of information from another site and republish it when you're adding additional value to that text on your site, and your ranks won't suffer. Just make sure you are crediting the original source - most commonly done in the form of quoting. Search engines do understand what you are doing here, and won't penalise you for it if you're not maliciously copying content.

Repeating From Your Own Site
What about duplicating content from within your own site, on different pages on one domain? As a general rule, duplicate content, while not preferable for SEO, will not be frowned upon unless the content intends to be deceptive or manipulative of search engine results. Search engines do a good job of choosing a version of your content to show in their search results, and will not fault you for having a little repetitive content within the pages in your website.

URL Linking Repetition
You might also be worrying about continually linking to the same URL within one page, as there is often talk around the web that search engines see repetitive linking within a single page to one destination to be link stuffing. This talk is not a myth, but there are ways around it.

Search engines are determined to provide users with a level of variety, they try to filter pages with duplicate URL linking so that users experience less redundancy when searching - so the search engines will select what they think the 'best' version of that link is in their results. However, a search engine's idea of the best link and your idea of the most important one within your page might be different. To get around this, you can simply let search engines know which URL is most important to add weight to in your Sitemap. Alternatively, use 'no follow' links, which don't hold any search engine weight, but will still be useful for your users to get them to the URLs you want to repetitively link them to.

Duplicated linking, if for no other reason, will deter search engines from effectively crawling your actual content. If their bots are spending a lot of time crawling multiple URL links within your page, eventually determining that they lead to the same place, they will have less time to get to the rest of your content because of your site's bandwidth.

Repetitive Page Titling
Did you know that repetitive page titles can also be considered duplicate content?

Normally, these duplicate issues are created unknowingly, perhaps without thinking about it or simply because of the way your content management system generates your page make up. The repetition of your brand name is the most common duplicate issue with page titling, which is fine to have on every page, but remember it's not the most important thing for optimal SEO.

Additionally, just having your brand name as your only page title on every page can give search engines the wrong impression about your site. Search engines may judge pages as duplicate before even looking over your page content if there isn't very much supporting text on the page.

To fix these issues, add in a targeted keyword phrase describing what is on each page within your site to the page title. Then if you want to, have your brand name following it, rather than preceding it. This gives you a greater chance of bringing qualified traffic to your site from search engines.

Duplicate content can affect your site's SEO in several ways, but as long as you're not deliberately copying from other sources and you link smartly, it's unlikely that you'll see your web pages penalised in their search engine rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation images from Flickr: Sorting Duplicate Tracks, Transparent Screen and Mac + Starbucks.