Have you ever gone through a situation where the content of your website looks similar to that of other websites? Well, if that is the case, then you may end up with huge penalties from search engines.
This further extends to lower rankings and visibility on search engine result pages, which sounds a death knell to your online presence. Furthermore, you’ll lose all the trust and credibility you built with your audience over time.
In this article, you will explore various ways to deal with duplicate content issues that are plaguing your website’s SEO in Calgary and other areas. Through these tips, you will be able to strengthen the SEO of your website with due effect.
What Do You Mean By Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is something that is highly identical or similar at more than one URL on the internet. This is a major issue that can impact the rankings and visibility of one page or more.
This issue is something that can happen to any website or across different websites. If you need to identify duplicacy issues, you need to look out for:
- Noticeable overlap in words, structure, and format with the other piece of content.
- Information that isn’t nearly original at all.
- Zero value for a reader in comparison with the other page.
How Can Your SEO Get Affected by Duplicate Content?
As mentioned above, duplicate content can have a negative impact on your search rankings no matter whether duplication happened on an internal or external level. Internal duplication make your pages cannibalize the ranking potential of one another.
On the other hand, external duplication may cause another website to rank well instead of the content that has been originally written by you. Some other challenges that you may end up facing with duplicate content include:
- Dilution in Backlink Power:
Backlinks are the links on other websites that direct to your own website and go through ranking power to your page. If your pages are identical to the websites you’re earning your backlinks from, you’ll be splitting your own ranking power instead of focusing on one main URL.
- Crawl Budget Getting Wasted:
Search engines don’t have unlimited time and resources(also labelled as “Crawl Budget”) to explore your site. When they are crawling multiple versions of similar content, they won’t be able to crawl or index essential pages. This can be more troubling if your website is quite comprehensive.
Interestingly, Google doesn’t usually issue a manual penalty for duplicate content unless it’s being manipulatively used at a large scale. Still, it can have a detrimental influence on the SEO performance of your website.
Common Culprits of Copylifted Content
Some common culprits that cause duplicate content include:
- URL Parameters:
Each time your site includes parameters to a URL, it ends up creating multiple URLs that include similar core content.
- Variations in Domain Names:
Your content may be accessible via various versions of your domain, such as HTTP Vs HTTPS versions of your site, and various other ways. Hence, a single page can exist at different locations.
- Syndicated or Scraped Content:
If other websites are republishing your content, whether it’s with or without permission, it will end up creating duplicate versions on different domains.
- Pagination:
If you are splitting content across various pages, each page will end up with similar content, but in different URLs.
Things to do For Dealing With Duplicate Content Issues
Here are some essential things you can consider for dealing with issues regarding duplicate content:
Execute 301 Redirects:
One of the best ways to correct duplicate content issues on your own site is implementing a 301 redirect, which will permanently shift one URL to the other. This method is effective for duplicates you don’t require to keep.
Moreover, various hosting providers and CDNs(content delivery networks) offer the most convenient ways to set up 301 redirects. People using Apache servers can also implement these redirects easily.
Utilize Canonical Tags:
A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML that describes the main URL for content that is copied or heavily similar. This is helpful in ensuring the indexing of the main version so that search engines consolidate the backlink power to that version.
Utilize Noindex Tag:
This is an HTML directive that informs search engines to avoid including a specific page into their index. This implies that this particular page won’t appear in search results.
Such an approach is extremely helpful in dealing with scrapped and syndicated content, i.e. when your content gets published on other websites with your permission.
In such situations, you should ask publishers to add a noindex tag to the syndicated versions, which will ensure that your original content is the only one that appears on search results.
Make Every Page Unique:
Sometimes, it is better to differentiate content on your website to make every page unique. The best approach you can apply over here is:
- Rewrite the content with unique perspectives and insights.
- Implement practical examples and actionable steps that can be followed by your readers.
- Add expert quotes, original research, and data that can support your points.
- Use SEO writing assistants to recognize any text you might have inadvertently copied in order to make it look original.
Request Other Websites to Remove Your Content:
Sometimes, some websites end up copying and publishing content present on your website without any permission.
Although the algorithms on Google are exceptionally better in recognizing and prioritizing the original source, you can take action if there are unauthorized copies of your content showing up on search results.
You can contact website owners and request removal of your content, which most of them will comply with to avoid legal complications.
Or else, you can submit a take-down request using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act via Google’s Legal Troubleshooting tool.
To Summarize
Duplicate or copylifted content can be really troublesome. It can have certain detrimental effects on your website’s SEO. However, with the above mentioned steps, you will be able to deal with such content and ensure better outcomes for your website, allowing it to rank well and be visible on SERP results.
Punit 
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