What is Duplicate Content Problem and How to tackle it?
Most of the bloggers come across the duplicate content problem at some point of time. This is a very common issue among bloggers. People believe that a site might be Banned from Google if they don’t resolve the duplicate content issue. Although there is no clear evidence favoring this belief, it’s still something which we should try to rectify as much as possible. Here, I will tell you what duplicate content actually is and what we can Do to tackle this problem?
What is Duplicate Content Problem?
When we have two or more pages with similar contents indexed in search engines, we can name the problem as a duplicate content problem. Duplicate content problem can be divided into two parts:
- Inter Site Duplicate Content – This happens when we have repetition of content across website with several web pages having same content. This usually occurs when we do copy paste from one page to another. Also when we change the URL of the page and keep the same content in it.
- Intra Site Duplicate Content – This happens when we have repetition of content across website at different locations. This occurs when there is any bad site structure or some Technical issues.
How to Tackle with Duplicate Content Problem?
There are several practices that we can follow to tackle this problem. They are listed below:
1) When you are using WordPress, there are chances that you face this problem if you publish same content on two or more number of pages of your web site. So, you should always publish a unique content in your site which is not a replicate of any of your posts you published earlier.
2) You should also be careful about bad website structure. When you have got a bad and complex website structure then the Webmaster finds it very difficult to crawl and it may sometime report duplicate content in your site.
3) You can use Canonical tag in this case. This helps a lot in resolving the problem.
Inside the <head> section of your less preferred pages you can add the following kind of line :
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.techzoomin.com/Reduce-duplicate-content-98/”/> .
This will act as a strong hint to the search engines that this is the address you would prefer them to index instead of the current page.
4) You can also make use of robots.txt File to inform search engines not to index certain pages. For that you have to add disallow rule to the robots.txt file in the root directory of your website. It looks like this:
User agent: *
Disallow: blog URL or Category
Adding this code disallows the particular page or all pages under certain category to be indexed in the search engines.
5) There is another piece of code you can include in your robots.txt which can resolve the problem. You need to include the following code in the robots Meta tag of pages you don’t want to get indexed:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
6) You should always check for all possible duplicate content of any article in the web before publishing it on to your blog. Sometimes, this happens that what you are going to publish is already there somewhere else and you can suffer from duplicate content issue.
Hope the above steps will help you to come out of this problem. Share with us if you have faced this kind of problem with your site.
sometime people copying the post from us, than we face the duplicate problem.. something that actually we don’t have too.
thank for the tips, never know something like that
Well this article is about we’re suscpected as duplicator, not as victim. But i think it’s should be also a discussion of we’re as victim, since it’s big matter also.
For your problem, since you can proving that you’re the original content maker, it’s no problem. The way is by ping every article published by you.
I have duplicate content in my blog and guess what? This content make number two in google SERP. It seems google has it own think about duplicate content.
So what’s the ranking of the other page? I think on duplicate content, only one suffers and it is usually the new page.
I just know that very serious consequences. Thank you for the information.
Well the concept is actually same with conventional book. It have intellectual right, and we can’t copy it. But we can quote it.
@izzat_aziz: Include a link back to your original post, so the bots will be notified and I believe they are smart enough to know which is original and which is duplicated.
how to report to google if someone copies a site contest
I don’t think you can report it to Google. Their bots will take care of it automatically. BTW, I assumed you mean content and not contest.
Google system will automatically take care of it. And actually, you can contact google, but i think you’ll get no reply (based on experience, their never replying my email:( )
What if you copy parts of several articles from different websites and paste it into 1 article and post it to your blog? Are you still going to be penalized for duplicate content?
I am not sure about that. Maybe you’ll get penalized, maybe not. Just re write it just to be safe.
Thanks ZXT. I just Do paraphrasing just to be safe.
I think it’s still suspected. Better check on copyscape or any duplicate content checker or rewrite it.
Nice tips.. Thanks for the info..
You find duplicate contents on most of the blogs……
Will paraphrasing stops the search engine from tagging my post as duplicate content?
Paraphasing is using another word to mean something, right? It’s mean rewrite, right? Yes, it’s the most safest way to prevent duplicate content suspection.
Yes. Because effectively its your own words.
Nice tips.. Thanks for the info..
I’m usually Do checking article on copyscape to prevent duplicate content matter.
How Do you do that exactly?