Do you wish to promote your business by honing up your website and ranking at the top of the Google Search engine results? If yes, then make sure to use potential keywords. Before disbursing on marketing strategies, first, know about all the strategies that are available to you and the local SEO services available in your area.
Plagiarized content can lower your website rank in Google Search engine and it can hurt SEO performance for few reasons-
Unwanted URLs in search results
Suppose the same page is available at few different URLs, Google can misinterpret and show other unnecessary URLs instead of the one which should have been shown and you get less traffic in your site.
Syndicated content which can surely outrank you
Copied content from your website into other sites may lower your rank in Google search.
Backlinks from unique websites
It results in the splitting of link equity between URLs and if Google sees both as cloned contents then one of them may vanish from search results.
Duplicate content: What are the causes of it?
Now the question arises- what is duplicate content? Well, it is that content that is accessible by multiple URLs on the web. When you search for any keyword in Google, the search engine shows similar webpages on your screen at once since it doesn’t know which one to list higher and hence all those URLs are ranked lower and the other webpages gets the predilection of Google.
There are several causes behind duplicate content
Variation in URLs
Suppose there are two URLs like- www.makers.com/maker1/ and www.makers.com/maker3/maker1 . Both are the same. Right? So accidentally the same post is cloned.
Session IDs
When you visit any website, you search through various items, and thus you are provided with a Session ID that needs to be stored in the URL and is unique to that URL. But sometimes due to some system fault, every internal link in the website accesses that ID and creates a new URL which means duplicate content.
Scraped content
Other bloggers can copy and paste your content into their website without your permission and thus creating duplicate content across the web. If your website is popular, the chances of your content being copied become higher.
HTTP vs. HTTPS and WWW vs. non-WWW pages
Take an example of two sites- “www.maker.com” and “maker.com” and the same content is there at booth versions, it result in duplicate content. Similarly, in the case of http:// and https://, if both versions are live, it may create duplicate content.
Printer-friendly versions
Suppose you create printer-friendly pages and when multiple versions of pages get the same indexed, it can cause duplicate content and harm SEO.
There are several SEO tools that are specifically designed to identify duplicate content.
Google will not foist penalty for duplicate contents but for the same search google gives ranking to other sites as well and if other sites are better than yours then automatically they get a better ranking which is similar to getting a penalty.
How to fix duplicate content and save your SEO?
Suppose you ask one person about “how to fix duplicate contents”. You will one answer, but if you ask four persons the same thing you will get several different answers. But you need one correct answer. Similarly, Google identifies one correct URL for a particular search which is called Canonical URL.
Ways to fix your website from duplicate contents-
Redirecting your website
To save your site from cloned contents, set up a server-side 301 and 302 redirect from the duplicate page to your original one. It makes sure that search engines are directed to the canonical page.
HTML element (rel= canonical)
Use rel=canonical attribute in the <head> section of the page and the correct URL in the href attribute.
For example- <link rel= ”canonical” href= ”http://makers.com/wordpress/seo-plugin>
But this method takes more time than 301 redirects.
Conclusion
Duplicate contents are treatable, so no need to stress. Keep an eye on the duplicate contents constantly and try to remove them as soon as possible. There are various search engine optimization services in India like Adtric, where you can get your website optimized and free from cloned content.
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