How to Identify and Resolve Duplicate Content Issues?

Duplicate content is the most common issue that can be seen on a website during the on-page audit. Websites might struggle to perform as per the expectations if they have duplicate content on it. We will discuss this in detail in this blog post along with the probable solutions which one can follow to resolve the issues.

What is Duplicate Content?

When the same piece of information is present on more than one page/location on the internet it can be considered as duplicate content. If it’s present on more than one page of the same website, it will fall under internal duplicity and when the same piece of content is present on any other website other than yours, it can be called as external duplicity.

How to Detect Duplicate Content?

The main question that comes in the mind of a website owner is how to identify whether the website has duplicate content or not. It’s always better to use automated tools available on the internet to detect the duplicate content if you are not sure where it’s present on your website. Below are some of them that can be used to identify it:

• Siteliner: This tool can provide you the information of duplicate content present within the website. All you need to do is to enter the URL of your website and wait for it to generate the report. The generated report will have a number of metrics and go to the duplicate content part to know the pages which are identical to each other or may be some portion common in them.
  

  Note: Free version of the siteliner tool allows you to crawl up to 250 pages so if your website has more than 250 pages then you can opt for their premium services.

• Copyscape: This tool is very useful in detecting the external duplicity i.e. it will list down the web pages which are having similar content. They are also offering a premium version.
  

There are more free/premium tools available on the internet which can be used to identify the issues. Now, it’s a turn to resolve the duplicate content issues once you have identified it using these tools.

How to Resolve Duplicate Content Issues?

This is a very crucial step and before moving ahead with the steps to resolve the duplicity, one should understand the purpose/cause of it, i.e. the solution is going to be based on the cause of the duplicity. Below are some of the ways listed which can be used cautiously according to the situation:

301 Redirect: One of the most common ways to resolve the issue is to place a 301 redirect on one URL towards the other which you want to keep. For example if you have two pages www.justanexampletoshowredirect.com/seo-services and www.justanexampletoshowredirect.com/seo-services-2 which are identical to each other. There is absolutely no point in keeping two identical pages live on the website which are promoting the same services, so the best solution here is to keep the main page and redirect the other using 301 redirect.

Canonical: This is another option to deal with the issues occurred due to duplicate content. There are instances when more than one page is required to showcase the content to the users due to some specific purpose. In this situation you cannot place 301 redirect as you want users to see all the versions of the page and at the same time you want to intelligently tackle the issues caused due to the variants of the page. This situation can be dealt with canonical tags i.e. you can specify the preferred version of the page through a canonical tag which you want search engines to index.

For example – Dynamic URL’s on a product website generated through different filters. www.justanexampletoshowcanonical.com/product/white-tshirt www.justanexampletoshowcanonical.com/product?color=white&type=tshirt www.justanexampletoshowcanonical.com/product?color=white&type=tshirt&size=xl

Robots meta tag: This meta tag allows us to instruct search engines how to crawl and index a web page. If you do not wish search engines to index a web-page then you can add a noindex tag on it which instructs search engines not to index the specified webpage.

Robots.txt: We can also use robots.txt file to block pages to be crawled by search engines. All you need to do is to add the specific webpage to the robots.txt file and search engine crawlers will not be able to access that page.

The best approach is to detect the duplicate content and try to get rid of the same using the above methods.