What Is Duplicate Content and How Does It Matter in SEO?

Let's go back to 2011 when google launched the first phase of the "Panda" update which would prove to be a wake-up call for SEO issues webmasters had been ignoring for too long. One of those issues was duplicate content. While duplicate content as an SEO has been around for years, the way Google handles it has evolved dramatically and seems to only get more complicated with every update.

Why Do duplicate content matters?

Duplicate content can cause these main issues for search engines:

1. They don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices.
2. They don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
3. They don't know which version(s) to rank for the query results.

True Duplicates: In this, any page is 100% identical in content to another page but just different in their URL address.

Cross-Domain Duplicates: When two or more websites share the same piece of content then there the cross-domain duplicate issue occurs.
Near Duplicates: A page differs from another page with a very small amount of given text that can be a block, image or the order of the content.

How to Check Duplicate Content?

There are many tools available to check duplicate content For example we have

Siteliner: This basically checks the duplicate content present in one or two pages of your website

How to fix the Duplicity Issues?

In most cases, duplicate content is not created deliberately by website owners but it happens.....

• Apply 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible.

• Solve the canonical tag issues problem i.e Implement the rel=”canonical” link element on your pages where you can.

• www and non-www pages issue should be taken care of. For example www.xyz.com and xyz.com issue

• Try to create unique content for your website and blog posts.

• The Uppercase and Lowercase URLs Counted as TWO different pages to Google so try to follow one practice in order to avoid the duplicate content issue.

1. www or non-www pages: When your site has two different versions of the web pages i.e one with and the other without the "www" prefix and each version have the same content. They both compete with each other for search engine rankings.
2. URL variations: At times, the same page of your website is located at multiple places. For example, In an e-commerce website the page featuring. An item of men's shoes on sale found. Both in the “Men shoes” section as well as the “Sale” section.
3. Session IDs: These are another reason for duplicate content. Various e-commerce websites nowadays involve the use of session IDs to track user behaviour. However, when each user is assigned a different session ID. It creates a duplicate of the core URL of the page where session ID was applied.
4. Copied Content: When someone copies the website content or the blog content from others website or blog and republish them on their website. Then, also this issue of duplicate arises.