Duplicate Content: SEO Best Practices to Avoid it With Canonicalization

In the world of SEO, it's good to know that there are many ways to stay in control. One way is by avoiding duplicate content on your website. According to Melbourne's Top Digital Marketing Agency, duplicate content is something that can affect your rankings negatively and it can also be very hard to fix. In this article, we will go over some of the best practices for avoiding duplicate content so that you don't end up with a penalty due to it.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is any content that’s the same on more than one page. This can happen when the same copy gets included in multiple places, or if a single piece of content gets indexed by search engines multiple times (for example, if you have an article that has duplicate versions across your website). This is where Melbourne Digital Marketing Agency suggests that duplicate content isn’t always bad—in fact, it may be completely necessary in some situations—but it can be problematic for SEO purposes.

How to Check Your Website for Duplicate Content

If you're already familiar with your website, you can use the search function to check for duplicate content.

• Search for a term on your website. If it finds more than one page of results, then there's probably a problem with duplicate content on your site.

• Search for the same term in another browser (e.g., Chrome). If the results are similar or identical, then there is likely a problem with duplicate content on your site that needs further investigation before you launch any SEO efforts on it!

• Search for the same term in another browser (e.g., Firefox), on another computer altogether—just to be sure that what you're seeing isn't due to an error specific only to your own computer/browser combination

How to Deal with Duplicate Content

If you have duplicate content, it's important to tell search engines which version of your content they should use.

• Use Canonical Tags

Canonical tags are used to indicate which version of a URL should be indexed by search engines. For example, if you have two versions of the same article on your website and want to make sure that both are indexed by search engines, you can use the canonical link element in order to explicitly tell the crawler which one it should consider as the canonical version and therefore index.

The canonical tag is an HTML attribute that is set on specific pages and informs search engines which version of a page they should consider when there are duplicated pages. It’s important because using a canonical URL helps with duplicate content issues but also prevents ranking penalties from being applied by Google (or Bing).

• Create a 301 Redirect

301 redirects are permanent. This means that search engines will not check the status of a page before following its 301 redirect, but they will check it after.

301 redirects are also helpful for visitors because they tell them to visit other pages on your site instead of being confused about duplicate content and links to dead pages.

301 redirects are not useful for duplicate content because they only replace one URL with another—not change the content itself. In this case, you should use rel=canonical tags instead!

• Create a Blank Index Page

A blank index page is a landing page that contains no content, but is linked to from other pages of your site.

Blank index pages can be used for several purposes, including:

• To create an additional canonical URL for an existing page on your website.

• To provide clarity about which version of a piece of content (article or blog) should be indexed by Google. For example, you may have published the same article in two places on your site. One may have been published as “My Article Title” while another was published as “My Article Title About My Topic” (note that this would also work using hreflang).

• By creating a new URL with no content—but pointing at both versions of the blog post—you can tell Google to prioritize one over another.

• Include No-Index Meta Tags in Your Pages

You should include a no-index meta tag in any page that you don't want to be indexed by Google. Melbourne Digital Marketing Agency suggests that it will tell search engines not to index this page, but it won't remove the content from Google's cache or remove any links from your site.

To add a no-index meta tag to your pages, use the following code:

This tells search engines that they shouldn't index this particular page and they shouldn’t show links to it in their search results.

Stay in Control When Producing Similar Content

If you want to avoid duplicate content on your website, the first step is knowing how to check for it. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Google Search Console's Fetch as Google feature to see if there's any duplicate content on your site.

Once you've identified duplicates, there are several things you can do:

• Use canonical tags (for example, ) in each page that points at the original page with correct URL structure so search engines know which version of each page they should index.

• Create 301 redirects from pages with incorrect URLs and/or different titles than their counterparts (if these issues are causing problems).

• Create blank index pages that direct users who enter incorrect URLs straight back to their landing page; this way they'll still reach the correct destination even though they typed something wrong in their browser address bar.

• Include no-index meta tags in web pages where applicable so search engines know not to crawl those pages when performing indexation tasks (this helps prevent duplication).

Conclusion

Duplicate content is a big issue for SEO, but it's not impossible to deal with. By following these best practices, you can avoid duplicate content issues and stay in control when producing similar content.