Those familiar with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) know website content is king. A common misconception with the “content is king” ideology is that any content is good. Unfortunately, that is simply not true. Original and unique content is what website owners should always be striving for. Too often, websites are filled with duplicate content, whether intentional or unintentional. Regardless of motive, duplicate content can come with repercussions for the website’s ranking and credibility. Here are the best strategies to deploy to negate duplicate content on your website.
Stop Inserting Duplicate Content
The easiest way to avoid duplicate content on your website is to stop publishing duplicate content if you are doing so. Some website owners copy and paste words or sections of a page and post them on another part of the website in an effort to save time or trick search engine crawlers. Search engine crawlers are not easily fooled and can detect duplicate content fairly easily using one of their many algorithms. Always type up original content and sentences. If sections across your website are similar, paraphrase or switch up the wording the best you can. Avoid plagiarizing and using copy and paste for work that is not your own.
Create Rel Canonical Tags
Implementing a Rel Canonical tag onto your website is one of the best SEO practices out there. A Rel Canonical tag will help clarify issues for website crawlers and bots when they attempt to index pages of your website. This type of tag will inform the crawlers and bots which page is original and which one is not when similar pages exist. A Rel Canonical tag is useful to protect your website against others who attempt to duplicate your content or plagiarize it. You can always check to see if a page on a website has a successfully implemented rel canonical tag by right-clicking on the mousepad and viewing the page source. If you can spot the word “canonical” on the page, the tag was properly inserted or already exists.
SEO Specialists in the Boston, MA area: Boston Web Marketing
At Boston Web Marketing, our team can help you increase original website content and cut down on any duplicate content. SEO can be a tricky process for some business owners and we can be with you every step of the way. Contact us today to learn about all the ways we can boost your website presence!