Duplicate Content in WordPress – What It Is and How To Fix It

Almost all of a website’s traffic comes from search engines. Internet users search for content they are interested in, and a search engine offers them links to that content. If so, a website operator will do its best to avoid being penalized by search engines and get the best possible search rankings. This is just scratching the surface of search engine optimization. Duplicate content is not a big deal for the casual user. However, in terms of SEO best practicesDuplicate content is harmless. Not only can it hurt a website’s rating, but it can also lead to the website being penalized by a search engine.

But what exactly is duplicate content? How can you make sure a search engine doesn’t penalize you for this? Can it be fixed and how? We will try to answer these questions and more in this article.

What is Duplicate Content?

Superficially, the term is self-explanatory: exact or near-exact copies of content appearing in more than one placecan be on the same website or on different websites. If the same content is available at two different URLs, you are looking at duplicate content.

There are several reasons why this happens. It can be an article has been republished on multiple websitesThe same block of text, such as , or excerpt, is used in multiple articles or similar. For e-commerce websites, it’s often a case of having lots of similar content on multiple pages – how many useful identifiers can you think of for a t-shirt? You may have accidentally copied and saved a page or your CMS allow the same content to be reached via different URLs. You may also have created printer-friendly versions of pages for your visitors’ convenience, or someone may have scraped or otherwise stolen your content and published it as their own.

Whatever the reason, search engines don’t like duplicate content. And that has consequences.

How Duplicate Content Affects SEO

More viewed links rank better in searches. Therefore, if a search engine finds the same content in two places in response to a query, it may not distinguish between them. You can sort them similarly and therefore dilute the traffic by splitting it into two links. This will lead to fewer views of your content and worse rankings.

Sometimes search engines can figure this out and group all URLs linking to the same content into a single cluster. But it doesn’t always happen.

Also, something you should know about search engines is that they don’t actually search the internet the moment they receive a query. Instead, they preemptively use programs called bots to crawl websites and create an index. Your search results will generally come from the directory rather than the internet. that means Duplicate content can cause a search engine to run slower This also means a slower rescan speed – crucial for content that is updated from time to time. Therefore, duplicate content makes it less likely that your visitors will get the latest information from you.

Finally, search engines penalize a website if they detect duplicate content as SEO spam. Simply put, this means that a search engine can delete a website or page from its index that violates its guidelines. In the particular case of Google, the world’s most frequently used search engine, this means that you should avoid creating multiple pages with duplicate content and avoid over-reliance on content scraping.

How to Check for Duplicate Content

you can try search and see your content whether it appears multiple times, but search engine results can be inconsistent and the whole process will be tedious especially if you are working with a lot of content. Fortunately, there are solutions.

online tools such as site author, Copy Landscapeand Plagiarism Checker by DupliChecker immeasurably useful copied content and plagiarism detectors. Siteliner will organize your website by alerting you to duplicate content hosted on a domain, Copyscape can be used to find copies of a page on the internet, while a plagiarism checker can search for blocks of text and copies of documents online. In fact, you should consider adding copy and plagiarism checks to your regular content audit.

How to Fix Duplicate Content

The solution to the duplicate content problem largely depends on why it happened in the first place and how you want to proceed. So let’s smash it.

Deleting Your Duplicate Content

It goes without saying that you can simply fix your duplicate content problem as follows. delete unnecessary pages and have your website re-crawled. We recommend this in case you accidentally created duplicate content. However, deleting a page can result in broken links and loss of capital (low ranking in SERPs).

301 Redirect

In most cases you will want to keep all URLs. Specifically, if there are other websites linking to them, you can avoid creating broken links and actually improve your page’s ranking in the SERPs by creating a 301 redirect. That way, all traffic is attributed to a single page for ranking purposes and you don’t lose any equity.

canonicalization

Another way you can setting one of your pages as standardusing the rel=”canonical” attribute between tags of a page. It tells search engines that the page is a copy of another page and has pretty much the same effect as a 301 redirect. To specify a standard page, simply add this code to your copy page:

<link href="https://qodeinteractive.com/magazine/duplicate-content-in-wordpress/ORIGINALURL" rel="canonical" />

Of course, you will need to replace the URL of your original page with ORIGINALURL. This makes your original page an official, canonical copy and adds equity to it.

Nofollow Links and Noindex Tags

You can choose not to delete your content, but also telling search engine crawlers not to show it or include it in their index. This way, you protect all your content, but only show search engines what they need to see. For pages with duplicate content, consider no-indexing a page or creating nofollow links. We recommend noindexing tag and category pages as these are created by your CMS and you have less direct control over their content. This is especially useful for e-commerce websites because your filters can be used in different order to browse your content, creating loads of pages with different URLs and exactly the same content.

Google Search Console

If your Google ranking is what really bothers you, Google Search Console To dictate the behavior of Google’s bots regarding your website. To avoid www and non-www URLs that lead to the same content, you can set your preferred domain version to include or exclude www, thus avoiding indexing two URLs to the same content. But as you can understand, this will only affect Google. Other search engines may still see copies of your content; so we suggest you try some of the above methods that work for all search engines.

Avoiding Content Scraping

If your content is being copied online by someone else, there is a lot you can do to prevent the content from being deleted on your website. Even disabling right click spawns some rotten eggs stealing your content.

As a result

Duplicate content happens especially as your website grows and evolves. As you produce more and more content, the chances of you unintentionally repeating yourself or using the same quote or similar increase. Small amounts of duplicate content are nothing to write about, and in most cases the duplicate content instances you create can be easily fixed. Preventing others from copying your content poses some challenges, but there are steps you can take to fix it. Whatever your duplicate content issue is, this article has a fix. Think of it as your toolkit and pick the right troubleshooting tool for you.