How to Identify and Remedy Duplicate Content Issues on Your Website
How to Identify and Remedy Duplicate Content Issues on Your Website
Content is the prime factor that determines how well your website would rank on search engines. It also is the most important link between your audience and the communication between your product and them. Going wrong with content would mean completing damaging your online proposition.
Building communication and engagement is on a human level and depends on how well you can articulate. But for ranking on search engines, the very basic requirement is that your content is fresh and does not come out to be duplicate or copied content.
Search Engines have been trying to find out which searchers match with the authoritative and relevant websites. Websites that have substantial amount of duplicate content do not really add much to the value for searchers. The worst part is, sometimes you may not even know that your website has duplicate content. There can be many issues of duplicate content, for example, Duplicate media descriptions, duplicate title tags, “twin” domains, categorization issues, and many more.
Causes:
- URL Parameters
- Printer friendly Pages
- Session IDs
Fixing duplicate content issues
Duplicate content can crash both web rankings and organic traffic, but it can be easily fixed. All you need is regular analysis of your website. It is best to have someone take the responsibility of performing these checks periodically.
At first, find out duplicate content problems that have affected your site by using either Google Webmaster Tool, or Screaming Frog. Google Webmaster Tools will help you find pages that have meta descriptions and duplicate titles easily. All you have to do is click on “HTML Improvements” that falls under “Search Appearance”. The Screaming Frog web crawler can be downloaded and you can crawl 500 pages without spending a penny. Now, to fix the issues:
Canonical Tag
The canonical tag helps you to mention the versions of a page that you want to return for search queries, to the search engine. In case you are using HubSpot COS, no manual labor is required as it would automatically be taken care of.
301 Redirect
301 redirect helps in redirecting every legacy page to another new URL, this way all link authority are sent to the new one from the previous page and are ranked for relevant search queries thereafter.
Meta Tags
Meta tags can be used to inform search engines that you do not want to index a certain page. For example:
<html> <head> <title>…</title> <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow"> </head> </html>
This option works best when you do not want the page to be indexed, yet want the user to access it, like the terms and condition pages. So we see, duplicate content issues can be a real hassle for most, but there are methods which can make your life a lot easier without much effort.
You must also ensure that whatever blog content you are going to put up has passed the duplicate copy check on one of the soft wares like copy scape.
About Author
jCorteza
Jenny Corteza is an education consultant and an online skill development blogger. She helps people understand what lacks in their profile for taking the next leap and find courses for them. The lean six sigma certification works great for business oriented people.
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