Struggles with Duplicate Content: How to Fix it?

The creators of any online content often face the problem of duplication. In order for your content to rank better on search engines, you need to avoid this duplication. That way you improve your SEO ranking and do not allow Google to reduce your influence due to such mistakes.

But being a content creator also means that you have to be constantly creative in your ideas. Sometimes this is not possible, for various reasons, so you need to make an extra effort so that such a mood does not negatively affect your business.

Keep in mind that we are talking about all this from the point of view of authors and writers and we know exactly the challenges that others face, including you.

Even the biggest brands have had similar problems before, and some still do. Shopify is one of the services that has encountered such a thing as:

– Duplicate pages with the same products.
– Duplicate product descriptions.

But it is also good to know that there are fine and elegant solutions to such problems. Sometimes it is necessary to first edit the text, by an editor or proofreader, and then arrange the repetitions.

You can always ask for advice from companies like PixelCutLabs.

What is duplicate content?

These are full texts, multimedia solutions, photos, or parts of them, which are constantly repeated on different internet domains.

But also repeating sentences in one piece of content is duplicate. Sometimes it is easy to regulate such a phenomenon and create relevance, but sometimes it is also difficult to notice. However, this will continue to negatively affect your search engine rankings.

Of course, we must emphasize that this does not fall under the category of copying or plagiarism. The first may happen by accident, due to carelessness or boredom of the topic. Copying and plagiarism are something else entirely – they are deliberately stealing content or parts of it and presenting it as their own.

If we try to simplify this even more, then we come to the definition that duplicate content is when the same sentences or multimedia are repeated on different links.

When Google detects this, it can lower its rankings and favor URLs with more unique text and articles.

But is that a problem at all?

If it’s not a problem, we would not talk about it. In fact, you can create that problem for yourself on your website.

One solution is to use an advanced CMS (Content Management System) which with the right tools will warn you that you have duplication.

A good example of this is if you have an article on a topic and you can access your site through both domainexample.com/article-title URLs and domainexample.com/category/article-title. Those two links lead to your site and you get your share of the cake.

But what happens if someone cites the first link, citing it in their article, and another author uses the second?

Instead of focusing that traffic on content that ranks high, you are actually diluting it.

Sometimes site owners are not even aware that such a problem can exist and therefore requires increased attention, but also duplicate content discovery tools.

Remember, search engines absolutely distinguish between URLs that look different. Although they lead to the same content, they are treated as different links, and different ranking criteria and parameters apply to them.

Who makes these mistakes?

If you use an old CMS with old-fashioned and outdated editing tools, it can easily happen that the site itself makes a mistake that can be fixed by deleting the duplicate in a timely manner.

Often, some CMSs allow you to manually change the URL slug, leading to the loss of previous content and its appearance under a brand new link. In modern solutions, there is redirecting, which is really practical, but not everyone knows how to add that tool to their website.

Such mistakes also happen unintentionally. In fact, it is the most common occurrence and therefore you need to check the content you publish often.

How did Shopify become a textbook example of duplicate content?

As you know, if you have your Shopify store, the service itself often keeps two versions of the site, ie it has a primary and a secondary domain. In this case, the traffic is divided depending on which URL will rank better for certain keywords.

Once the owners and developers themselves have noticed these problems, there is already a simple enable redirection button to fix this issue.

How to solve the problem?

There are several tools and services that will help you in-depth analyze what is happening on your site.

With the help of these analyzes, you filter the content that is duplicated or in any way distorts the SEO ranking of the site.

When you have critical content, it’s easy to delete or edit it in a way that will no longer dilute your efforts to rank better on search engines.

It is always a good idea to check the headlines, subheadings, and meta descriptions, as well as the slugs on the links so that you can resolve issues in a timely manner.

Be especially careful when creating a web and mobile version of your site. Make sure the link is the same. The same thing can happen with printable versions of your pages.

If you are using a subdomain or have recently enabled an HTTPS certificate, check again for any duplication during this process.

The same can happen if you use different domains if you have the ability to read content in multiple languages.

Hint: There is something called a hreflang tag that will help you with the visibility of your domains. Make sure you learn more about it.

We’re sure you do not do any of this on purpose, but nonetheless, duplication is detrimental to your site’s good rankings.

We recommend that you commit and educate yourself on this topic so that you can sort out existing problems, but also to avoid the same things happening in the future.

We hope that you realize that duplicate content is bad for your SEO ranking, and you will dedicate enough effort to learn how to avoid it.