Duplicate content can lead to ranking problems on Google and other search engines. Although there is no duplicate content penalty, your web pages may not rank as well as they could if their content can be found on other pages.
What is duplicate content?
Google definition of duplicate content:
Duplicate content generally refers to blocks of content within or between domains that completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
This is usually not misleading in origin. Some examples of malicious non-duplicated content could be:
- Discussion forums that can generate pages aimed at mobile devices.
- Products displayed or linked through several different URLs.
- Page printing versions.
Google tries to index and display pages with different information. This filter means, for example, that if your site has a “regular” and “print” version of each article, and neither of these are blocked with a noindex meta tag, it will choose one of them to list in the results.
If the content of a page is located on multiple pages, Google only shows one of these pages in the search results. Unfortunately, this might not be the page you want to see.
How to Find Duplicate Content Problems on Your Website
If your website contains duplicate content, the wrong pages may appear in Google search results. For that reason, you should check your pages for duplicate content.
The easiest way to find duplicate content on your web pages is to use the website audit on SEOprofiler. The website audit tool checks all the pages on your website and tells you about errors that may lead to ranking problems.
Of course, finding content problems is just one of the things the website audit tool does. In addition to duplicate content, the website audit tool checks all pages to find things that may have a negative influence on Google rankings.
How to Fix Duplicate Content Issues
There are several things you can do to fix duplicate content problems. Of course, you can do nothing and hope Google does it right. This is generally not recommended. Better do the following:
- Use the rel=canonical attribute to inform Google about the preferred version of a page. Details about this attribute can be found here. For most duplicate content problems, this is the best solution.
- Redirect duplicate URLs with a 301 redirect to the original page. In that case, the alternative pages will not be displayed at all. This doesn't work with print pages, because you want to display these pages.
You don't need to block duplicate pages in your robots.txt file, and you don't need to use a noindex attribute on these pages. Just use the two tips above and you'll be fine.