Thursday, 10 September 2020

What is Duplicate Content and How to Check for it During Website Audit?

SEO experts have always stressed on the importance of original content. Duplicate content should be actively shunned as this might not only severely affect your ranking, but also lead Google to penalize your website and have it removed from the search results.

What is duplicate content and what are its common causes?
Before we set out to find out the ways to detect duplicate content, it is necessary to understand what exactly the term means. Duplicate content is the content which is either identical to or closely similar in terms of wording and/or structure to an already existing piece of content on the World Wide Web.

Now, you might argue that you always take care not to copy content as it is from another source. However, duplicate content is not always the result of deliberate intent. Let us have a quick look at some of the common causes of this issue -

 Faceted navigation (especially in cases of ecommerce websites)
  Session IDs  can create a new URL for a particular session, leading to duplicate content
 Site accessible at two or more variations of http, http, www or non-www
  Print-friendly or mobile-friendly versions of the URL results in same content on different URLs
 Paginated comments
  Duplication through scrapers and content syndication

How to check for duplicate content?
There are many free and paid tools available on the Internet that detect any duplicate or plagiarized content. This will make sure that the content you have created is completely unique and does not resemble any content from another website, either deliberately or unintentionally.

These tools will also let you know that if anyone has scraped the content from your website, so that you can take the required action against the scrapers.

You can contact a digital marketing company for a complete audit of your website for content quality, duplicacy issues and more.

TSL Consulting Pvt Ltd is an integrated marketing company based in India. We offer customized outbound marketing, inbound marketing, digital marketing and data profiling services to a wide spectrum of small and mid-sized organizations.

No comments:

Post a Comment