Duplicate Content

By Adam  |  3 Jun 2016 12:00:00

One thing that anybody with a website of any kind needs to be conscious of is duplicate content. Duplicate content is one of the things which most search engine algorithms look at for as a reason for a website to rank more lowly – this makes perfect sense, because they don't want the first page of their searches to bring up multiple options displaying the exact same thing! The most obvious forms of duplicate content come from stealing content and buying pieces from writers who sell to multiple businesses, but there's a big form of duplicate content which you may not be aware of.

If a website has two variations of a URL which are both leading to the same page, through the eyes of a search engine algorithm, this is actually two different pages. This is because, technically, they are different pages. To avoid this problem, you could just try hard to avoid duplicating content with similar URLs like that, or you could go to the coding of the page and use the canonical href, which is explained in full detail here. It's well worth checking over your website to see whether there are many instances of duplicate content on your site, even ones caused by the structure of the website itself.

But one thing I should be clear about: duplicate content is not a black and white negative thing. If you write a blog article which then gets reposted on another website, followed with a link back to your own site, this will look good. You just need to make sure that it doesn't happen to a ridiculous extent. The rule exists to keep search results fresh and to stop people from stealing content, if you're doing something innocent and natural, you've nothing to be afraid of. Things like this are especially important to eCommerce websites, but if you don't yet have an eCommerce website, you should use RomanCart, because it can turn any website into an eCommerce website.