The problem of duplicate content is one of the most common impediments to SEO. Good SEO -friendly text should be, among other things, of appropriate length, contain keywords, and be unique. Unique content means it's published only in one place online.
Why is duplicate content a problem in SEO?
While not all duplicates are created equal (this means that plagiarism is perceived differently than sharing product descriptions with your distributor – the former would be viewed as reprehensible behavior, while the latter would be seen as a concern for the product's presentation), it is harmful from an SEO perspective. Content published in more than one place online loses its SEO value and doesn't help achieve higher search engine rankings. The easiest way to detect duplicate content is to paste a fragment of text into Google and check if it also appears on other sites. Duplicate content also results in content being placed in places such as auction sites, classifieds portals, industry directories, industry portals, partner and distributor websites, blogs, etc. (places where our content usually appears without our knowledge).
What can you do with duplicate content?
If we have noticed that our website has a duplicate problem, we have two main solutions:
- prepare new unique content – a time-consuming solution, but the best from an SEO perspective,
- we can contact the company that reproduced our text – perhaps we will be able to successfully enforce its removal.
It's important to note that Google considers duplicate text to be text its crawlers can read. Excluding a page with problematic content from indexing goes some way to addressing the harmful duplicate content (though it also prevents the page from being accessed by search engines).
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Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- the importance of unique content and the consequences of duplicating texts on the Internet,
- ways to deal with duplicate content on a website.
