How duplicate content affect your website ranking?

Duplicate content or identical content is said to have a negative impact on SEO. If you have a duplicate content in your website /article/ blog, then a search engine, especially Google, gets confused and will not be able to fix on which content to priorities and which page to elect as the best search results. This might end up dropping your ranking.

Duplicate content means stealing content from other sources and using it as your own. It can also be the content of your own website. If your company has two websites and if both sites have the same content, then it is also duplicate content. If you’re writing a blog content of 2 pages and repeating same content of the first page, this also is identical content. Google algorithms are written to do a lot of things, but they are unable to make decisions between two identical pages on which pages are to be ranked. So when Google identify duplicate content, it may not rank the page.

Recently Google has taken action against copied content and many sites have been penalized for having identical copy both within their sites and with other sites. Penalizing by Google affects your ability to show up in search engine results when potential customers search for your business. Instead of displaying your page in first page, you may be moved to the tenth page or so.

The better way to avoid penalizing is to remove the content. To check perfection in your content there are few tips:

1. Examine all the content and tags page by page and look for duplicate content. Make list of the content that you have to work on and make changes accordingly.
2. Use 301 redirect checker: Check your URL redirect for accuracy. It enables you to check if an URL / page are redirected. You can indicate Google through redirect check about the duplicate content.
3. Make sure that the syndicated content used is from appropriate site. The content from that site is legal.
4. Make sure that all the content is unique and fresh. You can use the plagiarism checker such as CopyScape or Duplichecker to avoid issues of duplicating content.
5. Report Google, if you discover that another website has lifted your content. This helps to prove that your content is original and reduce the chance of getting penalized.

Duplicate content is common. From 1000 pages we can find at least tiny duplicate content issues. It is important to constantly check and keep an eye to get it fixed. Duplicate content issue is fixable. Generating quality content can score SEO ranking and avoid content duplication.