How To Avoid Duplicate Content? – Answer By The Expert Of Semalt, Natalia Khachaturyan

Duplicate or copied content refers to the substantive blocks of an article within and across domains that match entirely with one another or are similar to a great extent. The most common examples of non-malicious copied content are:

• Forum posts that generate regular and stripped-down discussions and are targeted at smartphones and other similar devices
• Stored items that are shown and linked to distinct URLs
• The print-only versions of articles and web content

The Content Strategist of Semalt, Natalia Khachaturyan, explains that if a website has multiple pages with identical content, the chances are that Google will penalize your website. Most often, spammers deliberately copy content across multiple domains and manipulate the search engine ranking of a site and win more traffic to their own web pages. Such deceptive practices result in poor user experiences. When the visitors see the same article repeated on the internet, he will not show interest in your content. Google tries its best to crawl and show pages that have distinct information. It filters out a large number of websites and blocks the sites containing similar texts or duplicate content.

How to address duplicate content?

You can take some measures to address duplicate content on the internet, ensuring that visitors love your content because of its originality.

Method №1: Use 301

If you had recently restructured your website, you could use the 301 redirect in the .htaccess file. It will smartly redirect users to your web pages and will prevent the spiders and robots from landing your pages.

Method №2: Be consistent

You should keep the internal linking constant and always use the top-level domains to develop backlinks of your website. These domains should be relevant to your site and should be country specific.

Method №3: Syndicate carefully

If you have syndicated the content on other websites, Google is likely to show the versions that are most suitable and appropriate for its users. This method ensures that your web content and articles are syndicated and have links back to the original text or page. Thus, you should affiliate the content carefully and can use multiple plugins to perform this task.

Method №4: Use the search console and adjust your settings

You can use the search console and tell everyone how you want your site to be crawled or indexed. Instead of using a lengthy copyright text at the bottom of every page, you should write a summary and link it to all the pages using a WordPress plugin.

Method №5: Reduce the boilerplate content

You must minimize the boilerplate repetition to ensure your site's safety on the internet. For example, you can write a summary and link it to the pages with more details. Alternatively, you can try a Parameter Handling tool for specifying how you want Google, Bing, and Yahoo to treat your site and URL parameters.

Duplicate content is not grounds for action on a website until it appears on the internet in a large number and manipulates search engine results. In case your site is suffering from copied or duplicate content issue, and you don't know what to do, it's better to contact the other sites' administrators and get the content removed. You can also submit your request to Google, and the search engines will remove the infringing pages from its results.