If you ever get in touch with SEO practitioners, you may then noticed them talking about duplicate content. Do you know what duplicate content is all about? Well, you can get here an excellent opportunity to gather some vital details about such content and also several myths associated to it.
There are several myths around such content that most of the people generally believe and think it tends to cause a great penalty and also their various pages that can complete against each other and also hurt their websites. There are several SEO news websites publishing continuously articles that clearly reflect people don’t have much idea about what the leading internet search engine Google does for duplicate content.
Thanks to Google tried to clarify various myths around duplicate content years ago.
What does mean of duplicate content?
Well, duplicate content is something that generally refers to those of some substantive blocks of content within or also across the domains that either perfectly matches other content or are appreciably quite similar. People very often relate such content for a penalty because of how search engine actually handles it. In reality, duplicate content are indeed just being filtered in the search results. This is prima facie and you can easily observe this by adding & filter = 0 to the end of the URL and also removing the filtering.
You can mention adding&filter = 0 to the end of your page URL on a search for Raleigh SEO meetup and it will show you the exact same page appearing two times. These have been clearly indicated by red signs. However, these are not the pages doing any harm to the website itself.
Matt Cutts has clearly revealed that 25 to 30 pc of the website content is duplicate. According to the latest study conducted on the basis of data from their site auditor tool found in a similar result in that approximately 29 pc of pages containing duplicate content.
What does Google think about duplicate content?
According to some good posts published by many Googlers. Take a look at some excerpts:
- Duplicate content is not a factor causing your website to be penalized.
- Googlers are well aware of the fact that users generally wish a complete diversity in their search results and also not the same article over and over again. This is an important reason why they generally choose to show and also consolidate only one version.
- Google in fact also designed various algorithms aiming to prevent some duplicate content from affecting many webmasters. Such algorithm groups the versions into a cluster, the best URL in the cluster is generally displayed and they also consolidate various important signals from various pages within that cluster mainly to the one being reflected.
- Duplicate content is certainly not grounds for action unless its intent is for manipulating some search results.
- About the worst thing that generally takes place from this filtering is a less desirable version of the page will be reflected in search results.
- Google also tries to determine some original sources of the content and also displays that one.
- If someone is copying your original content without getting your consent, the original source reserves a right to erase it by just filing an application under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
- You should never block to duplicate content. If they are in fact not able to crawl all important versions, they can’t easily consolidate the signals.
Here are some causes of duplicate content
- www and non-www
- HTTP and HTTPS
- Parameters and faceted navigation
- Index Page
- Session IDs
- Alternative Page Versions like m. or AMP pages of print
- Trailing slashes
- DEV/hosting environments
- Country/language versions
- Pagination
- Scrappers
Explore here some effective solutions of duplicate content
- You don’t need to do anything and can expect Google can get it right
- Canonical tags are generally used for consolidating some signals and also choose your highly preferred versions.
- 301 redirect can really play a vital role in preventing important pages from even having the most duplication issues by preventing some great alternative versions from being displayed.
- You can in fact convey Google directly for handling URL parameters. Setting these up generally tells the search engine in terms of what parameters are generally doing instead of letting them try to figure it out.
- Rel=”alternative” – It is generally used for consolidating some alternative versions of a page like mobile or also many country language pages.
- Rel=”prev”=”next” is generally used for pagination.
