Having duplicate content may seem harmless to your site, but it definitely causes much obstacles to your search optimization efforts. The best way to illustrate why having duplicate content in your site is harmful is by pointing out the importance of unique content. Unique website content is what sets your website apart and what makes you different. When the same text is found in your pages, for instance, similar word-for-word data on products, presented in multiple URLs, you gain nothing. The same principle applies for when using the same information or text to describe what you do or the products that you sell as the next website.
Duplicity happens when more than one version of a certain page is indexed by a search engine, and this can be detrimental to your website’s rankings, as it makes it harder for search engines to determine which page to use and rank. To remedy duplicity of content within your site, there are certain things that you can do:
- • Redirect them – You can redirect duplicate content by setting up a 301 redirect from the duplicated page to the original content.
- • Canonical tag – when you use ‘rel=canonical’ tag it dictates which version of the page you want to be indexed and get located in the search results page.
- • Meta tags – Meta tags can also be indicate search engine bots which pages you want and do not want to index.
- • Syndication – Syndicating content should be done carefully to make sure that they don’t cause duplicate content issues. Ask your partner sites to use “no follow” links to avoid duplicity.
- • Responsive URLs – To solve duplicity issues due to mobile site versions, use a responsive or a similar URL.
