Duplicate Content Issues on Your Website? Easy Ways to Find and Fix Them
It’s easy to be fooled into thinking SEO is just about link building or ranking first for specific keywords.
While those are important factors, and staying up on best practices is essential, resolving duplicate content issues should be your top priority.
Often, the hidden cause of lost rankings and decreasing traffic isn’t that someone else does better at link building or keyword optimization.
On the contrary, the problem lies in finding and fixing issues on our sites that prevent searchers from finding us.
And when it comes to duplicate content, the devil is in the details — finding it and fixing the problem it causes on our sites. Luckily, you have control over your website, so you have the power to fix it. That’s precisely what I’m covering today.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content simply refers to identical chunks of content on different web pages. If it’s a sentence or a phrase, it’s not usually an issue. After all, there are only so many ways to say, “Contact us about our services.”
What’s more, if you frequently write about similar topics, you most likely have some common phrases
For instance, on my blog, I talk extensively about brand messaging, my framework for copywriting and content creation, and marketing strategy.
And if you read several articles from me — whether on my blog or a guest post — you’ll find several places where I may repeat my explanations of my approach.
That’s not what has the potential to cause problems unless you use deceptive tactics and behaviors to move your site up in the search rankings, which can cause a red flag for Google and its spam policies.
However, when you have entire articles, pages, or sections repeated word for word, or when multiple page versions are indexed, it can be challenging for Google and other search engines to know which articles to prioritize.
And because search engines rarely show duplicate pieces of content, they choose the best version for each search, which may differ from the page you most want to drive traffic to.
It’s important to note that people think of duplicate content in two ways — internal and external.
In this article, I’m primarily focusing on internal duplicate content, not content plagiarized elsewhere on the internet, which is a growing concern with the rise of AI.
However, in the tools section, I’ll also show you how to find and resolve duplicate content issues from across the web.
Why is duplicate content a problem?
In my experience, one of the biggest problems with duplicate content lies in even knowing that it exists on your site in the first place. When we create articles or products for our sites, it’s easy to hit publish and move on.
Sure, I might come back and update the article or make an edit or two, but by and large, with everything else going on, it’s not always top of mind to regularly check for duplicate content. …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
