Does Duplicate Content affect Your SEO Ranking?

So many website owners, bloggers have a deep confusion in their mind that does duplicate content affect their SEO ranking?

From our school days, we know that copying from our friend’s notebook is not a fair practice, and we should not perform it. Naturally, it seems to copy someone’s writing. But on the internet world, where billions of websites are live, having tons of content there, sometimes we find that two sites are having the same content.

Then we as a concerned person about search engine optimization of our website get in deep thinking; Is it ok to have identical contents on our site? Will this not harm our website SEO performance? In this article, we will give you detailed information about duplicate contents and their affectation on search engines.More or less we know about the copy content but affection of duplicate content in SEO, we will go through about duplicate content.

Does duplicate content affect your SEO ranking?

The answer is short and simple yes, duplicate or copy contents have a substantial negative impact on your website’s SEO ranking. As you are concerned about identical contents, you might know what search engine optimization is. We need to follow lots of processes and techniques to optimize our sites with search engines. You can read: The Beginner’s Guide to SEO to know more about search engine optimization.

Apart from this, there is no shortage of contents, no matter which category you are looking at. That makes our job search engine optimization makes it tough. To rank our website or content, we need to perform all SEO related works and keep in mind all SEO elements appropriately. Online SEO rank checker tools can help you to identify your position on search engines.

However, now as you know that duplicate content can harm your SEO efforts, so you need to skip copy contents. But before you leave that article here and start writing unique articles for your website, here, we would like to share some more important things related to duplicate contents. Besides, the above query people have lots of misconceptions and myths about duplicate content. Here we will let you know from scratch. Know,

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate contents are typically referring to those contents which are present in many places on the internet. To demonstrate more clearly, in a technical way, if any content is available on many URLs, that will be considered as a copy or duplicate content.

Many people know that matter, but some so many people think that copy contents are only those who are present on different websites or platforms. It includes, but if you have the same content on your site several times or in several URLs that will also be counted as copy content. So you, should this too. Just because it is your website and the content is exclusively on your site, that will make no sense. As multiple URLs of your site contain the same writing, it is duplicate.

Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?

Primarily duplicate contents create confusion for search engine algorithms to whom give a higher ranking. If multiple sites are having the same content, search engines cannot rank them in the same place. They have to decide which one should be on top. Search engines have a great solution to deal with these duplicate contents. If someone wants to rank on the search engine, they allow search engine crawlers to crawl their site and to store their data on their database.

Read: The Importance Of Clear And Crawl-Friendly URLs To Your SEO Efforts

Now, typically search engines have a relevant solution to catch and rank contents. They determine which platform uploads the content first. That is quite a useful technique to rank fair and original content creators.

But if the search engine ranks to the time order then it will be a mess.

When a visitor clicks content for a search result and then moves to below for another effect, simply they wish to get something else. If they find the same writing the same answer, it will give his/her a very poor user experience. So the search engine does not allow this type of thing. That’s why duplicate content affects in your SEO effort. If you understand search engine optimization, you might know that matter because same content is a negative factor in SEO. So you should be aware of duplicating content from someone.

Lot’s come to the point of how to solve the duplicate content policy. Like we said above the copy content might be in two ways for internal URLs, and for external URLs. We are mentioning both solving methods.

Firstly see,

How to solve the external duplicate content issue?

After reading the above part, you probably have understood that the external duplicated contents are cross-domain identical contents. These are the contents that have been stolen from your site. Plagiarized content is known as scrapped content. This type of duplicate content affects bloggers and content creators mainly. Bloggers and article website owners often face this duplicate content issue. If you have a quite popular article website, you put your hard effort and create attractive and unique ones; there is a big chance your content will be stolen. There are so many people who pick up your content and republish it on their platform without informing you or asking for your permission. Below we are mentioning how you can solve duplicate content issues?

Well, how are you going to deal with it? The main factor is to find you duplicate content in this ocean of contents.

1. The first method is simple. You can copy some of your content’s line and search it directly on Google. Most people use Google so, if someone is stealing your content, most probably, you can find it there.

Or,

2. You can use sophisticated tools for this occasion. These tools are smart enough to find if someone is using your content or not. Below we are mentioning two copy content checkers or plagiarism checker tools.

The first one is,

Grammarly:

Grammarly is quite popular as an extremely high-tech way to write error-free content. You can eliminate grammatical mistakes with Grammarly tool. But also it is a reliable duplicate content checker tool. You can easily check the plagiarism of your content. Although it is a free duplicate checker tool but for premium users, there are much more available.

The second option you can go with,

Copyscape:

Copyscape is also one of the most popular free plagiarism checker tools. You can use it to find out who is stealing your content on the web. Similar to the Grammarly, it has both free and premium plans. The premium package gives you more functionality and lots of more features to identify the duplicate contents.

Except for these tools, there are so many duplicate content checker tools available which you can choose from. After finding who is stealing your content, you have to deal with external duplicate content.

1. Firstly, you can contact the person or website owner and request them to remove that content from their platform.
2. If it does not work, you need to work a little bit more. You can reach them by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The United States copyright law protects the original content creators from being stolen their content. You can contact Google with the DMCA notice so that those duplicate contents will get removed from Google.

Now let’s come to the,

Internal duplicate content issue:

1. To avoid the internal duplicate issue, you need to write a unique title, meta description, for each page on your site. That is not a tough job.
2. When you are publishing any article or blog, make sure it is not repeating in another category.

However, if you still have done this, what options you have left. Well, to be straightforward, you have to delete that content from your website. This sounds pretty easy, and actually, it is. But, if you only do that, you will face a bigger problem.

When you publish any content, search engine crawlers crawl it and index it on their database. After indexing anything, if you delete it or remove it from your website, every time someone will try to go to that page, they will be unable.

This gives an awful user experience to the readers. Also, search engines count as a discredit. When crawlers come to search, they will find nothing so that it will affect your website SEO. To gain a better understanding of search engines you can read: How Does Search Engine Optimization Work On Google.

So, your job does not finish only by deleting your duplicate content on your site. So, you need to redirect that URL. That is the only best solution for already happening duplicate contents.

Below we are mentioning two duplicate content removal plugins. They only remove them but also help them to find out the identical contents.

Trash Duplicate and 301 Redirect Pro (WordPress Plugin):

This WordPress plugin enables you to find and delete a duplicate post on your site. Not only the posts but also you can remove pages, customs pages. This plugin lets you redirect the removed content URL to your primary URL.

Features of Trash Duplicate and 301 Redirect Pro:

•       It keeps your posts from oldest to newest by trashing duplicate posts/pages.
•       This plugin provides searching functionality to find content through title and post type.
•       You can import and export redirection data in CSV format.
•       You can trash down bulk posts.
•       The plugin gives you “Wildcard Redirection.” option.
•       You can add or remove redirections.
•       Redirection of posts automatically.

Delete Duplicate Posts (WordPress Plugin):

This WordPress plugin automatically deletes the duplicate posts and keeps your website from oldest to newest. Besides removing the identical posts, it posts meta, and other references too about the post. Also, it cleans up the space of your website. This tool is also very helpful to solve your internal duplicate content issue.

Thanks for reading. We hope this was informative. Read relevant articles,

• How To Create SEO Friendly Content By Using SEMrush?
• Why Content Is King: SEO Focus Beyond The Keywords.
• The Importance of Content Marketing For Online Business.