Duplicate content: Not good for SEO

Avoid duplicate content for better Seo

After nofollow, we will see another technical term that plays on the SEO of your blog: duplicate content.

What is it? When did we do the duplicate content? Why should avoid it and how to avoid it? This is what we will see now.

What is duplicate content?

 Duplicate content is text that is found in duplicate on the same site or across multiple sites.

It is a concept used in SEO as search engines such as Google penalize sites with no unique content.

This can be copied and pasted the text word for word, but is also considered duplicate content a copy with a few words changed. Whether in a paragraph or an entire page, Google sees everything!

There are 2 types of duplicate content:

1. Non malicious content: these copies made by the same author on his own blog or even elsewhere.
2. Malicious content: these are the copies generated with intent to "harm" and that does not allow Google to make its SEO correctly.

1. The non-malicious content :

• In the archives or categories of your blog:

You should know that for Google, a page with a unique URL. If multiple url have the same text, it is considered duplicate content. Thus, the articles that appear in both their own url, archives or category pages or keywords are considered duplicates.

• On your home page:

Some of you view your entire articles on the home page instead of extracts, this then gives Google a different URL for the same text: the url of the article and the URL of the home.

• When there are multiple versions of the same site, for example on computer (desktop) and mobile or printable versions:

When a website has a mobile version, it goes like this: when connecting to the site, a robot detects the media type and if it recognizes a mobile or tablet, we present the visitor a different version of the site "normal" .

The site is the normal type and www.DomainName.com 

mobile site m.DomainName.com type

As you begin to understand it, one has different url so it's duplicate content.

An alternative version of a page is the page that can be printed, you already have seen some sites link "Printable version" which is double of the original without menus or pictures etc.

• An article published several times on different sites by the same author:

an article published on a blog first, then the same that appears on a second blog belonging to you because you decided to make a blog without deleting the first migration.

2. Malicious content:

The term "malware" is used by Google itself in its recommendations on duplicate content. He considers it as malicious duplication is to maliciously directly or indirectly. Copies harm both:

• The actual author of the text that finds its content on a site without his consent,
• The reader will read several times the same thing on different sites for the same query, so who bring him any added value,
• Google that can not present relevant search results to users.

We find 2 types:

- Plagiarism:

Some "bloggers" (which are not for real) copy of the articles of existing blogs for content on them without writing a single line of text. Only the Ctrl, C and V will serve them on their keyboard.

- Spamdexing methods:

Before the recent updates to Google, you saw SEOs abusively use to their advantage the indexing criteria. They had several sites belonging to them and:

• they apply the same content on several sites so that only their sites are the first results of research,
• when Google started to penalize sites with duplicate They Duplicate content competing this time, so that the competitor's site penalized and no longer indexed in search results.

You have to be twisted (or a genius?) To think about doing that ...

Why should you avoid duplicate content?

You had to understand with the examples above, we must avoid the duplicated text because Google might think you have malicious content and penalize your blog.

This results in a de-indexing of your website on search engines is to say that people will not find your blog if they are looking for on Google, even with a search on the name of your blog.

There will always be accessible with the direct link or a link from another site, but since SEO allows you to make about 50% of visits on average on all sites, this would halve your blog traffic ...

But good news, Google now knows the difference between the original text and the duplicated text:

• For non malicious content, Google itself chooses to index only one of the pages doubons and to avoid it does so randomly, it is possible to indicate the preferred page with html tags.
• For malicious content, Google looks at criteria such as:

1. the date of publication,
2. the author of the publication.

How to avoid duplicate content?

Even if Google knows the difference between an original and a duplicate text, there are things you can do to avoid the duplicate content and risk being penalized.

Avoid duplication on your blog

• Put excerpts of your articles both on your home page in the archive pages, categories and keywords (tags), but also in your RSS feed. For WordPress, go to Settings / Playback / "For each item of a stream, choose" and check "extract".
• Tell Google not to index these pages with the noindex attribute. (Eg by extending SEO by Yoast).
• For mobile and printable versions tell Google what the original pages with canonical attribute.
• When you migrate a blog to a new domain name, do 301 redirects to tell Google that the old url should definitely be transfer to new.
• For articles you write, guests at other bloggers: do not recopy the article on your own blog. If you absolutely want to tell your readers, you can explain that you wrote about such a blog by a short introduction (unique and not repeated on Article-guest) and put a clickable link to the original article at the Another blogger. Now you understand why I ask my guest bloggers not to copy their article on their blog, it is unclear whether Google will penalize your blog (by date of publication) or mine (as the author's name)!

To check if you have duplicate content on your blog, you can go to the website Siteliner that checks all our blog and compare our results with the average of other sites. As against the free version is limited to scan 250 pages only. We do not realize, but with the archives etc, a blog can reach thousands of pages very quickly (for example, I have almost 2,000 pages on my blog when I have only a hundred articles for now).

Tracking down plagiarize :

In general, one realizes that one has been plagiarized when we stumbled upon one of our articles on another site, or if someone else sees it and tells us. There are sites that verify if any of our pages has been duplicated, such as:

• Copyscape
• Plagspotter and which also allow to see similar copies with a percentage of duplication (some change in a few words copied content)

Unfortunately there to look url by url (in article by article), which can be quite daunting. And I know of no site which allows to have an automatic alert plagiarized content, so if you know of one good, I'm all ears!

If you are a victim of plagiarism in one of your articles, you can:

• At first try to contact the blogger, saying that you have been copied without your permission. Some blogs are summaries of what they are elsewhere (as can be seen for DIY blogs) so it was perhaps not done maliciously.
• if it does not remove the content despite your request, you can notify Google of violating copyrights will check (through the information that you provide to them) then remove the duplicated page. Please read the instructions for Google because if your request is not justified and real, you have to pay damages.

Your turn to play

Do you know duplicate content? What are your techniques to avoid, tools to detect it? I have perhaps forgotten so feel free to share with us your methods in the comments below.

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