If you want your site to be well-positioned in SERPs, you don’t have to duplicate content. Here’s a quick guide to understanding why Google hates copied content.
Time passes but on the web, the king continues to be the content, just as Bill Gates said in 1996.
The phrase ” content is king ” was the title of his article posted on the Microsoft website in which he wrote: ” Content is where I expect much of the real money to be made on the Internet …”.
This premonition has materialized and has become the basis of the functioning of search engines and, therefore, of Search Engine Optimization. We must always remember that Google is hungry for content because users use it precisely to obtain information.
Now it begins to be clearer why the duplicate content and the SEO
The Topic Of This Post
- 1 What is duplicate content?
- 2 Google detests duplicate content: reasons and penalties
- 3 Frequent cases of content duplication
- 4 Tools and methods to avoid duplicate texts
What is duplicate content?
Among the guidelines for developers published on Google Search Central is the page Avoid the creation of duplicate content that begins with these words:
” The term” duplicate content “typically refers to blocks of important content within or between domains that are identical or very similar .”
This is the basic principle that you must always be clear when creating content for any web platform that you want to index and place on the search engine.
From here it can already be said that it is not advisable to copy/paste texts to fill different pages of the e-commerce, to expand an article published on the blog.
The debate on how and when Google penalizes pages with duplicate content is always open, but what is certain is that no SEO specialist worthy of the name recommends faithfully replicating paragraphs present on other sites.
Google detests duplicate content: reasons and penalties
Imagine you ask a question and 10 people answer the same words. How do you understand who is the original author of that information that seems fitting with what you requested?
Even for Google, it is a problem if in SERP when a user types or states one Query Whenever we look for something on an engine…
In an ideal situation on the answer page, you should find a ranking based on the relevance of the content to the question asked, each with a certain degree of differentiation that makes it unique. This pleases the user and, consequently, the algorithm too.
In reality, the search engine must rely on other factors to determine which content to put at the top of the list of results, such as the authority of the site.
It is not so common for Google to identify sites with duplicate content and decide to penalize them, but it is a possibility to be considered and not to be underestimated, because the effects could be really serious.
In the page for developers already mentioned above we read that:
“ In the rare cases, we find that duplicate content may be displayed with the intent to manipulate our ranking. Get a good ranking for relevant keywords for …and fool our users, we make the necessary changes to the indexing. As a result, the ranking of the sites could deteriorate or the sites could be completely removed from the Google index and will no longer appear in the search results ”.
As in a high-level sports competition, cheating can give results for some time, but when the referee discovers the wrongdoing, the athlete and the club he represents are fined. Similarly, Google analyzes the SERP contenders and heavily punishes those who go astray to cheat the system and the public that uses it.
Frequent cases of content duplication
By now anyone who approaches SEO knows that taking entire parts of texts from one site and returning them to another is incorrect and, above all, detrimental to the ranking, but sometimes content is duplicated without even knowing it.
For example, for Google, copying a considerable part of an article published on the blog connected to it on a web page of the company site means having duplicated that content.
The same problem can be present in e-commerce where different product pages are identical due to the descriptions of objects or services that differ in very few details (dimensions, colors, compatibility with specific devices).
You can also find yourself in the condition of having different versions of the same website. Typical cases are those in which you have a URL. Colloquially called a web address, it is a reference to a web resource such as a site, page, or file … with or without the www (eg www.nomesito.com and nomesito.com) or those with HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the foundation of the World Wide Web, and is used to load web pages using hyperlinks. HTTP is a protocol … and HTTPS (http://sitename.com and https://sitename.com).
Even the URL parameters can generate page twins in the eyes of the search engine. There are three insurance examples of URLs that would lead to duplicate content on the Google help center page on how to prevent crawling of parameterized duplicate content:
- https://example.com/products/women/dresses/green.html
- https://example.com/products/women?category=dresses& stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, it is a system to speed up the loading times of sites from mobile devices. With AMP you can create …; color = green
- https://example.com/products/women/dresses/green.html?limit=20&sessionid=123
Tools and methods to avoid duplicate texts
Let’s start with the simplest but not always an applicable solution: avoid inserting very similar or identical texts on different pages of your website.
You can copy/paste small passages also from external sources, but they must be limited and indicated citations (preferably with the link to the original article from which they were taken).
When it is not possible to write different texts for each page, as already said for the descriptions of products on e-commerce (e.g. black, green, red, brown cotton socks), it is necessary to communicate to Google what to do when its robot.
The tools most used by SEO specialists to manage duplicate content are:
- Redirect 301
- Rel = canonical
- Meta tag noindex
- Google URL Parameters tool
The 301 redirects are used to send the search engine robot and also the users from one URL to another, thus declaring that the page to be considered is the one in which you are automatically directed.
The canonical attribute is used to tell the search engine which is the primary URL between two that contain overlapping or highly similar content.
Instead, when you don’t want a site page to be indexed you have to insert the noindex meta tag which tells the robot not to include that URL in the results list. It should be noted that this tag is seen by the search engine as a suggestion and not as an imposition.
The systems to avoid the duplication of contents are to be managed according to the individual projects, so it is always advisable to rely on SEO specialists and web agencies capable of conceiving the optimization of a site within a real marketing strategy.SEO and duplicate content – here’s what you need to do
If you want your site to be well-positioned in SERPs, you don’t have to duplicate content. Here’s a quick guide to understanding why Google hates copied content.
