Developing and executing the perfect marketing strategy for your company is difficult. We are happy to give you a helping hand.
A close-knit group of people who breathe the Tilburg atmosphere and have the ambition to always go a step further.
In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), people are always wary of duplicate content. And rightly so, because identical texts can be detrimental to your rankings. But you don’t always control the originality of your content. After all, someone else can copy your texts blindly.
In this blog post, we look at what duplicate content is, the risk you run with it and how to prevent it. And for when, despite your own efforts, you become a victim of duplicate content yourself, we give you tips you can use to eliminate this duplicate content.
Duplicate content is also sometimes called duplicate content: it is (mainly) texts that appear on more than one web page. A classic example is external duplicate content: a page on your site will have the same content as a page on another website.
But duplicate text within your own website can also be flagged by Google as duplicate content. We then call this internal duplicate content.
From how many consecutive words or phrases the you are at risk of duplicate content, Google is not clear. According to the search engine, these are “significant blocks of content” or “largely the same content.”
SEO specialists disagree among themselves about the amount of content that must be identical before it qualifies as duplicate content. To play it safe, you would do well to make both titles and meta descriptions and both images and content as original as possible.
Google wants to make the Internet uncluttered, where information is easy to find. And because there’s little use for a user to see two pages with the same content below each other in search results, Google will have to make a choice: one of the pages retains its ranking, while the other appears pieces lower.
If your site has a lower PageRank (Google’s trademarked term for authority) than your competitor’s, chances are you will experience a dip in rankings. Therefore, in any case, you want to avoid publishing duplicate content yourself.
If it is obvious to Google that someone is publishing duplicate content with the goal of scoring higher rankings and cheating their visitors, a site can be removed from the search engine entirely. In other words, a complete Google ban.
You now know what duplicate content is and why you want to avoid it. Maybe you’ve even been doing that since the early days of your website. But how can you be sure no one copied you? Or that one of your employees didn’t go about things in a completely original way after all? The Copyscape tool lets you check for free which Web pages match the URL you provide. Click through to the search results to see the sentences that are identical; they are highlighted in red.
Especially for sites that produce a lot of content, it is useful to do such a Copyscape check two or three times a year. That way, you’ll detect duplicate content in time, before you suffer major consequences.
Duplicate content is a real no-no in the SEO world. But no doubt you already knew that. Still, duplicate content can creep into your website unnoticed. And because prevention is better than cure, here we look at what you can do to prevent a Google slap -a tap on your digital fingers.
It’s so tempting: copying text verbatim that you think isn’t online anyway, or will ever be online. But unless you wrote them yourself, you can’t take this risk. So do not copy externally supplied texts, but rewrite them in your own words. And then only publish them on one page.
Something good to know is that text in PDF documents is also seen by Google. Once that document is online, it is indexable and duplicate content can occur if you have taken content from a PDF.
Every text on your site should be unique. So even if you provide information about similar services or products, each page must contain original content. Admittedly, it can sometimes be a bit tiring to write an original text on a similar topic all the time – especially if you do this for a day.
Even if you don’t have an online store, it’s good to use an online store as an example. Imagine an audio store that sells speakers in three colors. This online store will then have to make a choice: create one page for all colors, or create a separate page with unique text for each color speaker. A text substantially different from the text about another color, that is.
Even if you make every effort not to duplicate content yourself, it can still happen that another website steals your texts. To make matters worse, Google may then “penalize” you with a lower ranking than the site that had copied your content.
Prevent that as much as possible by increasing your authority. How to do that? By creating rock-solid content, with internal links to make it easy for readers and external links to other quality resources. Actively go after incoming links through link building and promote your own content through social media.
It may happen that a piece of information on your site falls under two or more categories. For example, a venue may have a branch listed under locations but also under themes, to give an example. Each with its own URL, but with identical content.
This is not a disaster, as long as you use the canonical tag. You add these to pages with duplicate content. With this canonical tag, you let Google know which page the original text is on. That preferred page is called the canonical URL in SEO jargon. If you have multiple domains, this tag allows you to use duplicate content with impunity.
If you start using a new site structure, content may move with it. The old pages still rank in Google, but you actually want visitors to land on the page from the new structure. For this, you can set a 301 redirect on the unwanted page. With that, visitors coming to that page are automatically redirected to the new page. It then doesn’t take long for Google to understand your signal and rank the new page.
Did someone else copy your content? Whether you suffer from it or not, it is still plagiarism and that is punishable. The only question is whether you think it’s worth the trouble and expense of a protracted lawsuit. Either way, the first step is to contact the competitor to inform them of your discovery. Indicate that the content was copied without permission and that you want it removed within, say, 72 hours. If not, you will take legal action. In many cases, this threat will have the desired effect.
Of course, you can always ask for a source credit with a link back to your website. Then you immediately scored another backlink!
