How To Prevent Getting Penalized For Duplicate Content

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If you have a website that has a lot of duplicate content, you can easily get penalized by search engines.

How? Well the goal of the search engines is to find unique content, not content that’s the same throughout the web or even the same throughout your site.

Many people unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes so here’s some tips that will help you avoid having duplicate content appear on your site.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages.

For example, let’s say you run a blog and the main content is of course in your blog posts.

But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles!

And unfortunately the same is true of your archive pages.

So what that means is that any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages.

Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work; along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission.

Even thought this is legal, but not good from a SEO perspective.

So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn To Use Your Meta Robots Or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not.

If your page has duplicate content on it, just tell the search engines not to index it.

Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index.

Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages.

Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you’re using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-ins

If you’re using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you.

Make sure you get one that allows you to noindex your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content With CopyScape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with CopyScape.

CopyScape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was.

Though you’ll seldom run into an issue with outsourcers outright copying content, if it does happen it could ruin your entire site.

It doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with CopyScape.

Get in the habit of doing these few things and you’ll protect your rankings in the long run.

I hope that this information has been helpful to you and if so I’d love to hear about it!

Please leave me a comment letting me know at least one tip that you plan to use immediately because you’re know it will make a difference in your business.

Have an amazing day!

Pam Lawhorne

 

Tagged as: business blogging, business branding, business planning, communication, content, creative marketing, keywords, online business, search engines, SEO, success strategies, web 2.0, wordpress, world wide web, writing