Stop Duplicating! - Insight To Duplicate Content By Khachaturyan Nataliya, Semalt Content Strategist
Bing, Yahoo, Google and other search engines dislike duplicate content. The duplicate or copied content means similar articles and texts are shown on various websites on the internet. As a result, the search engines don't get an idea of which website publishes original content and how to rank multiple sites or blogs. It can hurt the ranking of different web pages especially when people have started their e-commerce websites and link different versions of the same content. It's possible to compare the duplicate content for quality as it can cause problems as multiple copies of the same text or article are present on various websites.
Khachaturyan Nataliya, Semalt Content Strategist, explains that as a reader, you will not like different sites posting the same thing again and again. Even the search engines don't like websites and blogs displaying duplicate content just for improving the ranks. If you face this issue, you are not alone as a lot of webmasters complain about it and different content management systems have been introduced to prevent duplicate content.
Causes of duplicate content
There are numerous reasons why content is copied and duplicated on the internet. Most often users don't copy content themselves, and it's mostly copied by the bots and spammers' robots. It happens because the developers don't think as the user or a browser and they only feel like bots or spiders. You might have noticed that the database systems power the whole websites and in the same database, there are websites and software that allow the same articles to be published multiple times on the internet.
1. The Session IDs
If you want to keep track of the visitors and store the information about your website, you should give the visitors different "sessions". The session is maintained when a user clicks on your link or web page through the session ID. You can use cookies to make it possible and it will mean that all the internal links get the session IDs appended to a URL.
2. The URL parameters used for sorting and tracking
Another main cause for duplicate or copied content is the use of different URL parameters that cannot change the content on a particular page. For example, you may see http://www.abc.com/keyword-x/and http://www.abc.com/keyword-x/?source=rss at the same time but they are not similar URLs and the search engines will rank them differently. Every parameter added to the URL cannot change the vital pieces of content.
3. Scrapers and content syndication
Sometimes the third party websites copy your content intentionally, without letting you know anything. They don't always give credit to your original content, and the search engines don't understand how to deal with these problems. The more famous your site is, the more scrapers and spammers will steal its content.
4. Comment pagination
In Wordpress and other content management systems, there are options to paginate the comments. It leads to the articles being duplicated on the internet.
The solution for the duplicate content
If you have decided which URLs are canonical URLs for your content, you should start the procedure of canonicalization as soon as possible. It means you would have to let the search engines know about the canonical versions of your web pages and let them find it as early as possible. In some cases, you can prevent the entire system from creating the wrong URLs of your content, but sometimes it gets redirected unintentionally. If you have copied the content of someone, it's important to credit the source so that the search engines get an idea of where does the content come from. However, we suggest you to avoid copying the content of others and write your own articles regularly. It will help you get good search engine rank.