Duplicate content can be detrimental to your website and hurt your SEO performance. However, there are steps you can take to prevent duplicate content on your website and avoid a negative impact on your organic search performance. Ensure your website is unaffected by following our methods to prevent and correct duplicate content across your website.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate or copied content is any exact or almost identical content appearing on search engines in multiple places. While you may not think plagiarising your own pages is a big deal. In the world of SEO, it is considered black hat SEO and widely discouraged as your organic search performance will be negatively affected.
Methods to Prevent Duplicate Content
Avoiding or fixing duplicate content on your website doesn’t require you to delete every occurrence of duplication. Instead, you want to ensure that the search engines can identify which piece of content is the correct version. While duplicate content is not a new topic of conversation, it is crucial to know how to identify and manage it with the prevention solutions provided below.
Set Up 301 Redirects
One way to avoid duplicate content on your website is to set up 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a handy tool for eliminating duplicate content. When using redirects as your solution, you tell the search engine that the page you redirect users to is the correct version. An essential step in this process is to evaluate each page’s analytics to direct the lower-performing page to the higher-performing page and reduce any impact on your site’s performance.
Use the Rel=Canonical Attribute
Another solution you can implement on your web page is the rel=canonical attribute, which informs search engines that the attributed page is a copy of the original. This solution performs similarly to the 301 redirects but is implemented on the page instead of the server. Once implemented into the desired page, all search engines will learn to send all link equity to the original copy of the page.
Contact Boston Web Marketing
Contact Boston Web Marketing and start working with New England’s largest independent digital marketing company. At Boston Web Marketing, our digital marketing specialists can assist you in avoiding duplicate content by creating unique and original content to increase your rankings. Reach out to us today and receive a free website analysis! For more information, please fill out our online contact form or call our office at 857-526-0096.