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Duplicate Or Not Duplicate? – Expert Of Semalt, Natalia Khachaturyan Knows The Right Answer!

Duplicate content has raised confusion among SEO experts for an extended period. It feels like SEO bugbear has to be eliminated otherwise it could cause your site to be removed from ranking. Although duplicate content comes with a penalty, there is a way in which Google utilizes a ranking algorithm to ensure that duplicate material does not affect the other pages on your site.

The Content Strategist of Semalt, Natalia Khachaturyan, tells that Google does not rank duplicate content provided there is another page with the similar content which is more popular on the site. If your website has multiple pages with same content, Google will have a hard time trying to choose the right version. It will only display one version of the content in the search results, and the other versions are hidden. Many SEO experts see this as a penalty. Three things happen in such a scenario:

  • Google does not rank the page;
  • The weight of that page is negligible;
  • The site will be marked as a reliable source of quality and unique content;

This gives the webmasters a reason to feel like it is a penalty, but it is vital to know that this is not all the search engines have to deal with. There are numerous strategies used in duplicate content, but not all are in the best interest of website users and searchers.

There have been many networks used by websites specifically to duplicate content with the hope that this might capture search traffic. They are not meant to add any value to the site, and generally, they add no value. You need to consider the mass of the content to come up with a plan to know where the search engine went wrong. There are numerous types of duplicate content which include:

Copied pages

As a site owner, you may come across a valuable content on another website. After reading the content, you feel that you would want to share it on your site. However, this is not a good idea, as this is not your original content and it will be poorly valued. Ultimately, such practice may lead to an overall drop in the domain score of your website.

The best way to fix this problem is using a cross-domain canonical tag. Add it to show that the original content is at a different website. The search engines will then know that the content was copied and it is on your site intentionally.

You have to realize that in this case all the weight of the link will go to the source of the content. This way, if you use many links, you will retain a small percent of the weight. If people love the content, the number of times they visit the site might exceed the decrease in page ranking.

Duplicate product information

Take a situation where you own a company that gets products from different manufacturers. You will need to get information like descriptions, specs, and images to put them on your site. You will provide the exact information as given by the manufacturer.

How to fix it: you will have to set your website apart. You will need to rewrite the descriptions and post unique photos for your product, which you can get from other sites like product reviews.

Disadvantage: the strategy can be time-consuming as you have to gather useful information to describe the product.

Multi-page product lists

This involves generation of URLs or if your site has many pages describing the similar core products.

How to fix the issue: for example, if you are dealing with five items and you generate a new URL every time you sort the item probably by size and price instead of alphabetical order, you will have fewer pages with the same content at different URLs.

Duplicate content can be stressful. If you are aware of the issue early enough, it will help you resolve it before it affects your ranking. You will be able to come up with plans on how to ensure that the weight pass via duplication does not have a significant impact on your ranking. The solutions to these issues can be time-consuming, but they are worth the time as it helps in generating a high ROI with every visit to your website.