Duplicate content is always harmful to websites. Although many claim that search engines don’t penalize websites with duplicate content, that’s not 100% correct.
Undoubtedly, duplicate content can significantly impact websites’ overall SEO score and may not achieve their desired results. Almost every website owner wants to bring organic traffic to their websites, so if Google doesn’t rank their pages due to duplicate content, it harms websites.
Want to rank your web pages on search engines and attract more visitors to your site? Then, make sure to avoid duplicate content. However, if you need to use duplicate content, use the best strategies to avoid duplicate content penalties. Have a look at some of the most helpful tips to avoid them!
Tips to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties
1. Always Create and Post Original Content
1. Always Create and Post Original ContentSearch engines always prefer original and valuable content. They want to show users the best results for their specific queries and reward original content creators. So, if you want to win search engines’ trust and rank your website, you must invest in creating original content.
Also, if your content is always 100% unique with no duplicate segments, search engines will surely rank your web pages. Plus, it’s the best technique to avoid duplicate content penalties. If your site doesn’t have duplicate content, you won’t have to face any penalties.
2. Detect & Remove Plagiarism
Whenever you want to publish textual content on your website, check it for plagiarism. A plagiarism checker will quickly detect and highlight all duplicate segments so you can remove them and ensure originality.
Once you find all instances of plagiarism in your content, you can rewrite those segments manually. Even if you don’t have enough time for that, you can paraphrase it using an online paraphraser. A versatile paraphrasing tool can perfectly recreate your text and remove all similar instances by restructuring sentences and replacing words with the most relevant words according to the context. In short, a modern paraphrase tool can ensure originality and make your text worth reading.
3. Use Canonical Tags
Sometimes, website owners need to add the same content to different web pages. In most cases, e-commerce store owners use this strategy. Although they should prefer posting original content on every page, somehow, if they want to use the same content on different pages, they should use canonical tags.
Canonical tags are specifically used to avoid duplicate content issues. Webmasters use them to indicate that a specific page should be preferred over duplicate content. That’s how they clearly guide search engines about their website’s content and clarify which pages search engines should prefer.
4. Apply Redirects
A 301 redirect is very helpful for website owners. As a website owner or SEO expert, you must know and use it when required. If you have posted content on a webpage but it is no longer relevant and valuable to readers, apply a 301 redirect and lead them to another page, especially the updated version of the same content.
By implementing 301 redirects, you can redirect visitors to a specific page and avoid most issues regarding duplicate content. Although applying 301 redirects takes minimum time and effort, it offers outstanding benefits.
5. Keep an Eye on Google Updates
Google keeps updating its algorithms to combat different blackhat tricks website owners use to manipulate search engine results and rank their websites against different keywords. Also, they update them to provide a better user experience. With every update, many websites lose their rankings and organic traffic due to some new policies.
If you want to avoid all the penalties introduced by Google and other engines, keep an eye on all the updates and analyze which things have changed. Specifically, you should analyze their content-related policies. These new policies can help you avoid all the new penalties and protect your website.
6. Always Check User-Generated Content
Many websites and platforms frequently publish user-generated content. It’s one of the best practices to bring diversity, enhance engagement, and bring referral traffic. However, webmasters should check the text for plagiarism before posting user-generated content.
Sometimes, users don’t put much effort into writing original reviews or articles. They just copy the text from other platforms and submit it as it is. Posting those types of content can harm a website’s overall SEO score and impact its rankings. So, you must not trust them; double-check the text and analyze whether it’s unique or not. If you find it’s unique, publish it on your site. Otherwise, never post it.
Conclusion
Duplicate content can harm your website as it can force search engines to de-rank your web pages and provide minimum traffic. So, no matter what, you should use the best strategies to avoid such penalties and make sure your website reaches its targeted audience. This article suggested some of the best and most effective strategies for avoiding duplicate content penalties. Implement them, and you will reap the benefits of your efforts.
