Duplicate content is defined as online content that is found in more than one place on the World Wide Web. When there is indistinguishable content floating around on the internet, search engines have a tough time figuring out which content is more pertinent to a specific query. This makes things complicated for organic ranking. Now, organic ranking is the rank that is given to a website on the results page of a Search Engine for distinctive keywords depending on website content. It is called ‘organic’ as it is supposed to be pure and natural. Duplicate content in websites always sabotages your search engine ranking due to the mentioned confusion.
Duplicate content can be either completely similar or substantially similar. Content is sometimes meditatively copied across domains to mold organic rankings and score more website traffic. Search engines never tend to show similar or duplicate content and are strong armed to choose from the best content available. Search engines do this by relating this to a website’s organic ranking.
There are several reasons why duplicate content can be harmful for organic ranking.
Firstly, Search engine has no clue which versions to incorporate from their indices. They can’t figure out whether to point the link metrics to a single web page or isolate them.
Secondly, they don’t know how to rank the similar content for keywords and specific queries. Hence, Search Engines have a hard time providing germane results to the users. They generally omit the duplicate results.
Thirdly, building trust is impossible with duplicate content and customers may also notice this.
So, duplicate content is really harmful for your websites as you suffer from bad rankings along with traffic losses. Another very important issue is that the other websites, which have your syndicated content may have a greater ranking than you. This might just occur due to their muscular domain authority. Why would you want duplicate content floating on your website anyway? It’s plagiarism to copy someone else’s work, and you surely don’t want your website to become noted as a spam site. If you do want someone else’s property in your website, be sure to provide a link back to the original content.
If a website has more than one page with extensive matching content, there are quite a few ways to pinpoint the preferred URL (Universal Resource Locator) to the search engine. This method is known as ‘canonicalization’. Content should always be canonicalized whenever duplicate content is found in more than one website. A 301 redirect to the correct URL is one method to do this. This is the process of combining multiple pages into a single page, which cuts out the competition between the pages. This results in a greater ranking, a better relevancy and more popular signals. Some more ways of removing duplicate content have been noted to work. Prolonging consistency is one way to do it when you are conjugating internally through a website. You also need to check that the syndicated websites add a link back to the genuine content. You should always try to find new ways to minimize similar content swimming around as they only end up harming your organic ranking. Contact any SEO services provider which can help you in dealing with the duplicate content issue.
