How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues for Better Search Performance?
When a potential consumer searches online for information about your online store, you want the most suitable web page from your online store to come first in the search results. However, what happens if search engines are unable to decide which page on your site is the most appropriate?
Duplicate content is a prevalent but sometimes neglected issue that can reduce your exposure on SERPs (search engine results pages). When similar or identical material appears on several web pages, search engines such as Bing and Google have difficulty deciding which page deserves to be ranked first.
Knowing how duplicate content functions and how to address it is crucial if you want to increase organic traffic to your website and enhance its search engine ranking.
What Exactly is the Definition of Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content occurs when a web page contains content that is identical or comparable to that of other web pages. Both external duplicate content—similar material on multiple websites—and internal duplicate content—similar text on pages within the same website—can lead to duplicate pages. Duplicate content is caused by technological difficulties, inadvertent human error, plagiarism (some content scrapers search websites and grab data to repost on other websites), or the reuse of text across several versions of the same page. Moreover, the duplicate content may also include reused images; these images are used multiple times, leading to confusing search results. To handle these image-related issues, it is advisable to use a duplicate image finder before posting any content. This ensures you do not use one image twice or more often.
For example, your e-commerce website may have multiple product pages with similar wording or images, which could have a detrimental impact on how search engines perceive your website.
However, panicking will only increase stress; therefore, let us discuss some of the effective fixes.
How to Address Duplicate Content Issues?
Use these tried-and-true methods to find duplicate content problems in your online business and address affected webpages:
Audit Your Website for Duplicate Material
One of the simplest methods to find duplicate information on your e-commerce website is to do an easy search on Google. Enter “site:yourdomain.com” (replace “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name). This will list all of the pages on your website that the search engine has recently crawled. In the search results, look for pages that have similar titles, descriptions, or body content. When you encounter duplicate material, record the affected URLs in a spreadsheet to decide which websites need to be reviewed and updated.
Redirect Websites that Contain Duplicate Material
Redirecting landing pages with duplicate content back to the source page is one of the best ways to address duplicate content issues. When search engines index and crawl your website, they use redirection to only index the web addresses to which they are directed, so increasing the ranking of the most important sites where you decide to reroute traffic.
To implement this strategy, use a 301 redirect—an HTTP status code that alerts search engines that a specific URL has been permanently relocated to another URL.
Include Canonical Tags on Original Pages
A canonical tag is a component of HTML code that tells search engines which URL to index. By enabling search engines to compile multiple versions of a website under a single URL—the canonical URL—canonical tags can help website owners organize their pages and improve SEO efforts.
To manually add canonical URLs to your store, put one line of HTML code before the last </head> element in your theme layout file: <link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}”>
Consider Using Noindex Tags to Prevent Duplicate Content
If duplicate material is still ranking on SERPs despite using canonical tags and 301 redirects, consider adding HTML code that instructs search engines to disregard that specific page, also referred to as a noindex tag.
Adding noindex tags to a page with duplicate material disables it from SERPs, allowing you to favor the page with minimal competition. Similar to how canonical tags are positioned in your theme layout file, you can put a noindex tag before the final </head> tag. Here is the code for a noindex tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>.
Conclusion
When several websites with similar or identical information appear on a search engine results page, both users and search engines fail to determine which web page is the most authentic and appropriate to their query. Therefore, it becomes crucial for the site owner to resolve such an issue. If one fails, then the impact will not only be on the website but also on the business it represents.