Duplicate content refers to text that has similarities with another piece on another website or different pages of the same website. Having excessive duplicate content on your website can negatively impact its seo score as well as damage its ranking position.

In simple words, duplicate content can be a killer for your website’s authority and credibility in front of both the search engines and the target audience.

Now, the problem of content duplication is not always intentional. If you are struggling with this problem and are looking for the best fixes, read this post. In this guide, we are going to discuss in detail the problems caused by duplicate content, why it happens, and how you can fix it. Let’s get started…

Why is It Important to Avoid Content Duplication?

There are many reasons why it is important to find and eliminate duplicate content from your website or blogs. Here in this section, we have discussed the top ones for your knowledge:

1. Search Engines Get Confused

The biggest problem caused by intentional or even accidental duplicate content is that it confuses search engines.

When search engines find multiple versions of the same content, what happens is that they no longer know which page or which version should be indexed or ranked higher above the rest. To avoid the confusion, search engines end up indexing none.

Another common issue faced by search engines is deciding on the authority of pages having similar content. Each page or site would be attracting unique backlinks and would have a separate link equity. This makes it difficult for search engines to return DA scores fairly.

To avoid confusion, all pages or sites having duplicate text would drop out of the search results.

2. Duplication Burns Crawl Budget

Search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo, all tend to crawl all pages they can on a website. But having duplicate content causes search engines to crawl unnecessary pages, which results in reduced efficiency.

Duplicate content reduces the frequency of how each page gets re-crawled, and it burns the budget. This damages the authority and credibility of your site and compromises its seo position.

3. Compromises Page Authority

If there is more than one version of the same content on multiple pages, then any backlinks or internal links would be divided between the different variants instead of pointing authority to one.

The total collective page authority from all backlinks could have benefitted a single page, which would have helped it rank higher, but because of duplication, neither version can make it to the top.

This compromises authority and doesn’t just kill your ranking position but also reduces your chances of building links with high-authority sites.

4. Outranked by Duplicate Version

Your website or blog’s content can be copied by other websites, and if you haven’t put proper settings in place, the duplicate version can sometimes outrank your original version.

Content duplication or plagiarism can easily hurt your visibility, flow of traffic, and rankings because Google doesn’t know which version is original until and unless it is specified.

What are the Common Causes of Duplicate Content?

Before you learn how to fix duplicate content, it is important to understand its common causes. Let’s discuss some of the common ones:

1. Ignorance of the Publisher

One of the most common reasons behind content duplication is the ignorance of publishers or their lack of awareness regarding plagiarism.

They might copy content from another website or their own and publish it as a new draft without making any amends or giving credit to the original version. This act of self-plagiarism or direct plagiarism can result in duplication and penalties.

2. URL Variations

URL parameters can also cause duplicate content issues. Click tracking or analytics codes are the most common reasons behind content duplication.

Now this problem isn’t caused by the URL parameters themselves, rather it is caused because of the order in which they appear. Session IDs are a common duplicate content creator. This happens when each user visits a website and is assigned a different session ID.

3. HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW

If your site exists in different versions or is registered with different addresses, such as HTTP, HTTPS, WWW, etc., and the same content is published on all versions of the site, this results in direct duplication.

If different versions of the same website are live at the same time, all of them would be penalized by the search engines because of the duplicate content issue.

4. Direct Plagiarism

If you are copying content from another website intentionally or vice versa, it is going to result in duplication. Some people might think that reusing a blog’s content on a landing page or doing it the other way around would help them get away with plagiarism, but this is not true. Two or more similar versions of the same content would always be penalized by search engines.

5. Poor Paraphrasing

Poor or low-quality paraphrasing can also result in plagiarism charges. We have seen many websites and ecommerce stories rephrasing content like product descriptions or blogs borrowed from other sites without giving them proper credit or ensuring 100% originality. Note that poorly paraphrased text also falls under the category of plagiarism, which is why it is best that you always manage rewriting tasks with a word paraphraser.

How to Fix Duplicate Content Instantly?

The problem of content duplication or plagiarism is increasing every day, and this is because the amount of content being published online has skyrocketed. Website managers and bloggers are using both manpower and AI generative tools to create and publish content every day, so it is quite natural that multiple sites working on the same niche would have similarities in their work.

Now, to avoid the problem of duplication efficiently, it is advised to leverage modern tech and tools. Here is how you can do it:

1. Always Use a Plagiarism Detector Tool

First things first, no matter how much effort you have put into the research stages and writing, it is important to understand that even a version written completely by you could have similarities with another post. So, it is necessary to scan your content with a credible plagiarism checker.

Today, you have access to tons of free plagiarism checker tools that can analyze every sentence you upload, break it down into smaller phrases, and compare it with billions of web pages. This detailed analysis helps these tools identify both intentional and accidental traces of duplication.

You cannot only identify duplicate content but also find out the matched sources. This way, you would be able to find websites or pages that are stealing from you and report them right away.

2. Rely on an AI Plagiarism Remover Tool

A plagiarism remover is a cloud-based utility that relies on natural language processing and other learning models to analyze your uploaded text and restate it in different words without changing the intent. Sometimes it can be impossible to manually eradicate plagiarism or outsmart detection algorithms of plagiarism checker tools, which is why it is best to leverage a reliable AI plagiarism remover.

The plagiarism remover tool would make sure that the new version is unique, error-free, and better in terms of readability than the original version. The best thing is that you can get a plagiarism-free version within seconds and don’t have to put in any manual effort.

Conclusion

Duplicate content refers to text that is similar to another piece published on another website, or the same one, for that matter. It is important to note that plagiarized content on your website can damage your authority, seo score, and ranking position. This is why it is important to find and remove it before putting it up for indexing.

In this post, we have discussed in detail what duplicate content is, why you need to remove it, different reasons that cause this problem, and most importantly, how easily you can eliminate it using modern tools.

We hope that after reading this guide, you will surely be able to get rid of plagiarism and ensure 100% originality in your site’s content, which is what is important for quality backlinks, high authority, and top rankings!

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Written by RGB Web Tech

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