Have you wondered why your website isn’t ranking as high as you’d like, even though you’ve followed all the best practices for SEO? It could be that your website is suffering from duplicate content.
Duplicate content is “substantive content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar.” In other words, it’s when multiple websites have the same or very similar content.
This is a problem because it confuses search engines, which don’t know which version of the content to rank.
It is essential to adopt the right SEO strategies to avoid duplicate content and ensure that your website ranks high in search engines.
Read more: 12 Tips for Getting Your Website to Rank on the First Page of Google.
Duplicate content can occur for a variety of reasons. Maybe you have multiple pages on your website that are very similar, or someone has copied your content and published it on their site.
There are a few ways to check for duplicate content. Read on to understand how to check for duplicate content and what you can do to fix it.
Ways To Identify Duplicate Content in Your Website
1. Compare Two Or More Pages on Your Website Using a Tool Like Copyscape
Copyscape is a plagiarism checker that allows you to compare two pages side-by-side to see if there is any duplicate content. If there is, you’ll need to make some changes to your website so that Google doesn’t penalize you for having duplicate content.
2. Use Canonical Tags
Canonical tags are those little bits of code that tell Google (and other search engines) that a specific URL is the “master” page for a piece of content.
For example, suppose you have an article about “How to Make a Pie Crust,” and that same article appears on three different URLs on your site. In that case, you can use a canonical tag on two of those pages to tell Google that the other two pages are duplicates of the first.
3. Use Google Search Console To Find Duplicate Content on Your Website
Google search console is a powerful tool that can help you identify and fix various SEO issues on your website. It helps you track your website’s search performance, find and fix errors, and submit your sitemap to Google.
One of the many helpful features of Google search console is its ability to identify duplicate content on your website. To use this feature, select “Search Traffic” from the left-hand sidebar and click “HTML Improvements.”
4. Compare the Meta Data of Two Or More Pages on Your Website
Metadata is the information in the head section of your HTML code. This includes things like the title tag, meta description, and canonical tag.
If two or more pages on your website have the same metadata, it strongly indicates that you have duplicate content.
You can use a tool like Screaming Frog to check for duplicate metadata. Just enter your website’s URL and let the tool crawl your site.
Once it’s done, click on the “Meta” tab to see a list of all the metadata on your site.
If you see multiple pages with the same title tag or meta description, that’s a sign that you have duplicate content.
For the best services in SEO in Atlanta, call SEO Guru. Our team of experts will help identify duplicate content and work to optimize your website to avoid any penalties from Google.
