Duplicate content refers to content that appears in more than one place on the internet. That “one place” can be described as a location that possesses a unique website address (URL)-therefore, if similar content appears in more than a single web address, that’s Duplicate content.

Why is duplicate content an issue?

1. For Search Engines:

Duplicate content can cause 3 major problems in Search engines:

They do not know the versions they should include or exclude from their indices

They do not know if they should direct the link metrics (authority,  trust, link equity, anchor text) to one page or separate them into multiple versions 

They do not know the versions to rank for query results.

2. For site owners:

When there’s duplicate content across webpages, site owners could suffer severe traffic losses and low rankings. These losses can result from  the following main problems:

To give the best search experience,  Search Engines rarely display multiple versions of similar content, they are therefore forced to choose the best version of the duplicate results. This dilutes the visibility of both duplicate versions.

Link equity could be further diluted since other websites have to select between the duplicate content as well. Rather than the inbound links pointing to a single piece of content, they link across multiple pieces, spreading the link equity across the duplicates. Since the inbound links are a major ranking factor, they can hugely impact the visibility of such content. The net result is that that piece of content does not achieve the search visibility it was due to get. SEO Agency provides services that improve the visibility of any website by eliminating irrelevant backlinks and duplicate content.

Impact of Duplicate content on SEO:

Generally speaking, Google does not like ranking pages containing duplicate content. Google states that ” Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information” Thus if you have web pages on your site that lack distinct information, this could immensely affect your Search engine ranking.

Precisely, 3 main issues may affect pages with duplicate content

Less organic Traffic:

Google doesn’t like to rank pages that contain content that has been copied from other sources in Google’s index.

Penalty (rare scenario):

Google states that duplicate content attracts a penalty or even complete deindexing of a website.

therefore, if you have several duplicate pages on your website, you may be subject to this. 

Fewer indexed pages:

This is especially critical for websites that contain lots of web pages like e-commerce sites.

Sometimes Google does not just rank pages with duplicate content poorly, it completely fails to index it.

Various Types of Duplicate Content:

There are 2 main types of duplicate content:

Internal duplicate content occurs when a domain creates duplicate content over multiple internal URLs (on the same site).

External duplicate content is also known as cross-domain duplicates and happens when two or more different domains possess the same page copy that has been indexed by search engines. Both internal l or external duplicate content can appear as exact duplicates or close duplicates.

Although Google does not impose a penalty on websites with duplicate content,  it filters identical content whose impact is similar to a penalty as it leads to a loss of ranking for the webpages.

SEO Consultancy services would help in getting rid of duplicate content as well as improve the overall performance of your website.

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