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Why is Having Duplicate Content an Issue for SEO: And How to Avoid it in Your SEO Strategy

Writer's picture: Search MonsterSearch Monster

Updated: Oct 3, 2024


Powerful Local SEO Strategies for Small Businesses: Tips and Strategies

Duplicate content on your website can harm your search rankings and in the long run — your website visibility and traffic. This blog will explain why duplicate content is bad for SEO, and how you can avoid it.


You, a website owner, might be under the impression that duplicate content on your website is not so serious. You might already have multiple pages that contain similar information or material and that is okay. In SEO, however, that’s not the case. Let’s get into the particulars.


What is Duplicate Content?


Duplicate content is the content in a website that is identical or substantially the same as another page on the site. It can be caused for a number of reasons, including:


Pasting material from other websitesPosting the same text in multiple pages of your siteDrafting multiple versions of the same page (e.g. Boilerplate or cookie-cutter for several pages.


How Is Duplicate Content Bad For SEO?


There are several SEO problems caused by duplicate content on your website, such as:


Saturation Search Engine Rankings: Search engines such as Google, aim to provide their users with the best quality content and value. In a case where multiple pages have the same content, the search engines aren’t in a position to see which page is most relevant, and may rank them down or do not index them at all.


Decreased Traffic: Decreased traffic on your website due to depressed search engine ranking. If people can’t find you in the search engines, there’s no way they’ll find your website.


Burnt Crawl Budget: The crawl budget of search engines when it comes to crawling your website is quite small. You have tons of duplicate content on your website so the search engines have to crawl all those pages and less time for your new content. This can cause you to have your valuable pages ranked poorly in search engines.


Get Stuck: When a user visits multiple pages on your website and finds identical content on them, they become confused and frustrated and have a bad experience.


SEO Guidelines for Duplicate Content How To Avoid Duplicate Content?


Since you know now that duplicate content is a problem for SEO, here’s how to avoid it:


Create Original and Unique Content: You can not create a copy of content for seo, you should only generate original and unique content. That includes doing your research and producing something valuable for your audience.


Canonical Tags: If your website hosts different versions of the same page, you can use canonical tags to inform search engines which version of the page is the original. This reduces ambiguity and keeps the right page indexed.


Don’t Use Boilerplate Content: Boilerplate content is unoriginal material used for many different pages of your website. Rather, write different pages and deliver valuable content for your visitors. To know more about boilerplates click here.


Redirect Duplicate Pages: If you have several pages with similar content, redirect them to a single canonical page. This is great for streamlining your content and avoiding muddle with search engines and users.


Track Your Website for Duplicate Content: On a regular basis scan your website for duplicate content with the aid of Google Search Console or SEMrush. This will help you detect any problems and remedy them.


When you’ve got duplicate content on your website it’s a bad SEO mistake and can hurt your rankings, traffic, and user experience. As a way to avoid duplicate content and make a clearer sense of why duplicate content is an SEO concern, implement these simple steps mentioned in this blog post.

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