One of the most important aspects of producing internet content is getting a high ranking on search engines to improve business prospects. If your content is duplicated or not original then it has a very high chance of not ranking well. Unoriginal or duplicate content is any content that appears more than once anywhere on the internet.
This means that any content that is in more than one location or site with its own URL or web address it is called duplicate content. If you are having trouble with this type of issue, then contact your Gold Coast SEO Company for a simple cost effective solution.
Duplication presents issues for search engines
Appreciably similar content is very hard for search engines to process as determining which version is the most relevant to a given search query can be difficult
- Search engines cannot tell which version is the most relevant or which should be excluded or included in search indexes
- Search engines do not know which of the versions can be ranked for search queries so could give all a lower ranking and dilute the visibility of the duplicates
- It makes it difficult to tell if the content should be linked together
How does duplication happen?
Usually website owners and content creators do not intentionally create content that is duplicated or copied, but because of the huge volume of content that being produced and loaded onto the internet every minute it is inevitable that some very original content (content that is not copied) will be the same as other content. This is why it’s advisable for all content to be checked for plagiarism before it’s published.
It has been suggested that up to 25% of web content is a duplicate, this can be because:
- URL variations
Inexperienced operations can mix up their URL parameters with some analytics coding causing duplicate content issues’
Session ID’s when users visit your site and are assigned different session ID’s that become stored in your URL
When someone downloads a printer friendly version on your site allowing multiple versions of your site to be indexed
Have all your content checked by the guys at Gold Coast SEO to detect any of these issues
- Sites with Different WWW, Non-WWW, HTTP and HTTPS
If you have your site listed and live with WWW, Non-WWW, HTTP and HTTPS, you are likely to have duplicate content issues
- Product information
E-commerce site using manufacturers’ descriptions, content and product information can find they have duplicate content issues because there are a lot of websites that are selling the dame products, so this must be kept in mind when creating your website content
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is when your content is taken and claimed by another site as their own, this is a copyright issue and although it is illegal it seldom results in a Google ranking issue.
Duplicate content affects your site rankings because when the search engine crawlers come across it they do not know where to rank it and the seldom rank anything they find that duplicates earlier discovered and ranked content well. Have your content created or at least checked by Gold Coast SEO will reduce any duplicate issues