Content Duplication in SEO
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With the arrival of the Internet, organizations have a new medium for promoting their
business and products. This led to the emergence of search engine optimization which is now
leading the internet world. If you have just finished building your website then the next task
on hands is its optimization. Search engine optimization is the best way to promote your
business worldwide and attract visitors and customers. Unfortunately some people suffer huge
losses during this process as they get penalized on various search engines because of content
duplication.
Content duplication is something which is very common nowadays and has raised many
questions. In general, content duplication is nothing but the presence of the same content on
two different websites. These sites are known as mirror websites. In order to curb content
duplication various search engines have started penalizing websites for having the same
content. This is the reason why many websites and web pages don’t show up in search engine
results.
With duplicate content there is no guarantee as to which page will show in search results and
which won’t. Moreover, duplication of content also means that some sites and some pages are
not indexed by search engines at all. Websites carrying duplicate content never get indexed
and will vanish from the search engines index.
Search Engine’s checking for Content Duplicity
There are various places where search engines see duplicate content. Few of the popular ones
are:
1. Product descriptions and manuals: The first and foremost place is the product descriptions
from various manufacturers, publishers and producers. This usually occurs on large
ecommerce sites. When one or more website offers the same products, they tend to use the
same descriptions. This is nothing but content duplication.
2. Alternative print pages: This is something which is unknown to many website owners.
There are various websites offering the same content on different pages that may be formatted
for printers.
3. Pages that use duplicate syndicated RSS feeds: When RSS feeds from various websites are
reproduced on other pages in addition to the original source website. This appears to be
duplicate content as the text which is being displayed using server side includes is presented
as html on the pages.
4. Canonicalization reasons: This is a new term to the world of content duplication. Herein a
search engine may locate the same page as different pages with different URLs. This is why it
is also known as a “canonical URL”.
5. Article submission or syndication: For optimizing reasons, many site owners create articles
and for popularizing offer them others for linking and attribution to the original source is
made. This is at times tagged as content duplication by various search engines.
6. Mirrored websites: In content duplication this is the most widely used method. It has been
seen that when a website becomes popular and busy people tend to look for an alternative.
This is when they create a mirror website and the mirrored website carries the same data or
content.
Many popular websites have used mirror sites in the past and for this they often use multiple
servers and load balancing techniques. Unfortunately search engines can easily detect
duplicated URL structures of mirrored websites.
Ill effects of Duplicity
If you are facing difficulties with the web pages of your site showing up in search engines, if
they are shown as supplemental results or even if they seem to be disappearing from the index
of a search engine, then content duplication is the issue that is harming the pages of your
website.