It is an undeniable truth that content serves as the cornerstone of a website. It can take a site’s traffic from zero to thousands and millions of users. While content can prove to be a game changer for a site, it could also be a hurdle in propelling the site to new heights.
This is because not every type of content increases a site’s ranking in search engines. Some types of content are harmful to search engine optimization and create unwanted SEO issues. Duplicate content appears to be the most destructive.
It badly impacts the site’s SEO and ruins all your efforts to make your site appear at the top of search results. It comes with many problems for a site. If you are unaware of them, you must learn how they can affect your site.
For your convenience, we have crafted this guide that covers the possible effects of duplicate content on your site’s SEO and includes helpful ways to avoid duplicate content issues. So, make sure you read this article to the end. Ready to uncover them? Let’s get started.
How Does Duplicate Content Impacts SEO?
Duplicate content doesn’t just affect a particular SEO metric; rather, it hits different essentials that collectively damage a site. Here are the possible ways it can badly influence SEO:
1- Decrease Ranking
One of the most severe effects of duplicate content is reduced site ranking. This is because search engines don’t want any site to feature the same content on multiple pages.
When they encounter more than one web page with identical content, they get confused. They struggle to identify the original version. This confusion makes it difficult for them to decide which page to rank and which page to ignore. Due to this illusion, they sometimes rank the wrong page.
Resultantly, the page you want to rank doesn’t appear in the search results. This reduces its ranking in search engines. When your site has a large number of pages with the same content, it not only lowers the visibility of the victim page but also affects the overall ranking of the site.
2- Lowers User-Experience
User experience is one of the most important ranking elements that duplicate content negatively impacts. When users find the same content on multiple pages, they get frustrated. Duplicate content acts as a hurdle for them in finding the information they want.
It weakens the interaction between a site and its users. When they continuously go back and forth to discover the needed content, it makes them feel overwhelmed. As a result, they leave the website and go to other sources where they can easily get the required information.
Until you solve the problem, the users keep bouncing from your site. It seriously affects essential SEO metrics like bounce rate, engagement rate, average time spent, etc.
3- Causes Indexing Issues
Since there are billions of websites on the internet, search engines strategically index web pages. They spend limited resources and time crawling and indexing the pages of each site. Once they allocate a fixed crawl budget to a site, they don’t scan or index a single page above the limit.
When your site has several pages with duplicate content, the crawl budget gets wasted on crawling pages that don’t need to be crawled. This leaves fewer resources and time for unique pages, causing them to remain unindexed and useless.
If your site is new or has thousands of pages, inefficient crawling and indexing can become a big issue for you. This can cause your unique pages to struggle every time bots come crawling.
4- Drives Search Engine Penalties
Search engines want a site to publish a particular content on one page only. They demand that you have unique content on every page of your site. When they see multiple pages having the same content, they perceive that you are trying to manipulate search results unethically.
To stop you from featuring duplicate content, they may penalize your site on different levels. This includes lowering site ranking against particular keywords or deindexing all the pages with similar content. This causes a drastic decrease in overall ranking.
In severe cases, they might permanently delete your site. Whether your site is new or already has sufficient traffic, these penalties can be a nightmare for you.
How To Avoid Duplicate Content Issues?
Implementing prostatic practices can prevent your site from facing duplicate content issues. Here are some helpful methods.
1- Monitor Pages For Content Originality
Regularly monitoring every page for content originality reduces the risk of duplicate content. It helps you identify whether a page’s content has a duplicate version. When it comes to ensuring uniqueness in content, an efficient plagiarism checker is the best solution for you.
When you upload content of a particular page to a plagiarism detector, it scans the text deeply and looks for duplicate versions on the internet, even on your site. If present, it provides you with links to all the pages that share high similarities with your input content. So, using it, you can easily determine whether your site has duplicate content or not.
2- Produce Unique Content For Every Page
Another helpful way to avoid duplicate content is to produce unique content for every page. Whether it is home, services, products, about us, or any page, it should have distinct content. Come up with fresh ideas and write every word on your own using your thoughts and opinions. However, you might also conduct research for this purpose to take inspiration from others.
Well, if you wish to source content from others, practice effective paraphrasing to make it unique. Also, credit the original creator properly to stay safe from duplicate content issues.
To Sum Up
After reading this article, we hope that you now understand the negative effects duplicate content has on SEO. So, from now on, make sure that you do not put your site in danger by following the above-mentioned preventative practices.
