Content marketing's position in Poland continues to strengthen year after year. This is evidenced by the volume of content created and published daily by both large and small businesses . Furthermore, recent research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that as many as 88% of B2B marketers incorporate this technique into their strategy.
Despite the growing popularity of content marketing , many people still commit one of the biggest sins: duplicate content . Moreover, they often do it unconsciously. What exactly is duplicate content, and how does it affect your Google ranking?
Duplicate content – what is it?
According to the commonly available definition, content marketing is based on the creation and distribution of interesting and useful content intended to attract a specific audience. Although it doesn't mention "uniqueness," it's easy to guess that plagiarism isn't defined as attractive content (and duplicate content certainly falls under it).
Duplicate content occurs when the same piece of content is published on two or more websites. Importantly, this doesn't necessarily involve stealing an article from a competing website, for example. As mentioned in the introduction, many people aren't even aware that their website has duplicate content. How does this happen?
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First, if you don't create your own content, but rely solely on outsourcing, you must choose your contractors carefully. There's a certain risk that copywriters working for suspiciously low rates may be copying from other sites. Other instructive cases are also frequently reported on online forums. Sometimes, for example, people who order product descriptions from agencies or freelancers find identical content on a competitor's website. In such a situation, if the contract didn't mention the obligation to transfer copyright, your efforts to seek redress may prove ineffective. Second, content duplication can occur within the same website.
An example? Simply sell a product in several color variants, each with its own subpage. The products differ from each other only in one seemingly insignificant detail. Therefore, you create a universal description that will be published on every product subpage. And this is how you commit duplicate content. Based on the examples described above, it's easy to guess that duplicate content is divided into two types: external and internal.
External duplicate content
External duplicate content occurs when the same content is published on two (or more) company websites. This phenomenon is most often caused by:
- deliberately duplicating (stealing) content from other websites,
- copying information about specific products from the manufacturer's website (even copying the technical specifications word for word may be considered duplicate content),
- quoting larger fragments of text without using the proper semantic reference (e.g. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach(…) – contentmarketinginstitute.com ).
Internal duplicate content
Internal duplicate content refers to duplicate content within the same website. It most commonly occurs when:
- a given text will be used on several subpages (e.g. product pages),
- no 301 redirect was used, so the page loads both with and without the WWW prefix,
- several URLs lead to the same subpage, e.g. www.verseo.pl/kontakt/ and www.verseo.pl//index.php/kontakt/.
Copying content and Google
Now that you know what duplicate content is and when it occurs, it's time to discuss its consequences. First, you need to understand that duplicating content is a criminal offense and can result in legal action. Second, duplicate content negatively impacts your website's SEO. As is common knowledge, Google dislikes duplicate content.
For this reason, its algorithms verify the content of pages and can then penalize fraudulent activities. Of course, the type of penalty depends on the severity of the offense. In extreme cases, such as large-scale plagiarism, this can result in the imposition of a filter or even the blocking of the site. Without a doubt, duplicate content negatively impacts SEO . If Google detects such activity, it will also result in a significant drop in the site's search rankings . Returning to your previous position can be a very difficult task. Of course, if you've discovered that a competitor has duplicated content from your site, don't wait for the algorithms to intervene.
Duplicate content – how to check?
Wondering how to check for duplicate content on your website ? Fortunately, there are several useful tools at your disposal. Some of them are available at www.copyscape.com and www.siteliner.com. To verify, simply enter a link to your website, and the algorithm will begin searching for duplicate content.
If your website contains internal duplicate content and you lack specialized SEO knowledge, it's worth entrusting this task to professionals. Improper actions in this area can do more harm than good – for example, lead to your page being indexed by search engines. Only attractive, useful, and UNIQUE content is the recipe for content marketing success . This, in turn, positively impacts your website's SEO and effectively reaches potential customers.
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Frequently asked questions about duplicate content
Duplicate content is when identical or confusingly similar blocks of text appear on more than one URL. This phenomenon is divided into internal duplication (the same content on different pages of your website) and external duplication (copying your content onto other pages or downloading it from other websites).
Google algorithms (including Google Panda) promote unique, valuable pages. When crawlers encounter the same content on multiple sites, they struggle to determine which version is original. This leads to search engine confusion, keyword cannibalization, wasted crawl budget, and ultimately, a drop in ranking or even removal from search results.
Internal duplicate content is usually the result of technical errors. These include: running a website simultaneously on both WWW and non-WWW (or HTTP and HTTPS) addresses, incorrectly implemented filtering, sorting, and pagination in online stores, and assigning the same product to multiple categories with separate links.
The most common sin in the e-commerce industry is mass copying product descriptions directly from manufacturer or wholesaler websites (so-called catalog descriptions). Because hundreds of other sellers do this, Google treats such a store as a low-value copy and doesn't display it high in search results.
To eliminate duplicate content, it's crucial to write unique, original content. From a technical perspective, it's imperative to implement appropriate 301 redirects (e.g., forcing only one version of a domain) and use rel="canonical" tags (so-called canonical links), which clearly indicate to search engines which version of a given subpage is the main, original version.
Summary
The above article covers the following topics:
- what does duplicate content mean in SEO,
- how Google responds to copied content.
