Duplicate content is when two similar content has different URLs. This makes it difficult for Google to determine which is the original source. Even web users will be confused as to which content they should choose to read and believe (this is especially true if there are only blocks of texts similar and the whole text isn’t copied). This can get confusing for inbound links, too. To which URL should it link back to? Your site’s Tampa web design is going to suffer because it wouldn’t rank as high as it’s supposed to. The presence of the duplicated content will affect that ranking.
What should a site owner or manager do? Assuming that you are the original author of the content or it’s a technical issue within your site’s framework, here are some of the things that can help solve this issue:
Set Up a 301 Redirect
A 301 redirect will direct any visits to the duplicate site to your site. If yours is the original content page, you’ll get all the inbound links the duplicate site generates. When duplicate links are now connected to one site (the original one), they will stop competing with each other. In fact, they will create a stronger presence on the internet. They can become more relevant and popular. The original page will rank better because there are so many signs pointing to it as the right URL.
Use Rel=”canonical” Attribute
This is similar to the 301 redirect but none of the developmental issues. This is easier to implement because it happens on the page level, the HTML. The rel=”canonical” attribute tells search engines that all links, ranking factors, and metrics of this duplicate page should go to the original source of the content. The original URL will receive all the credit that these duplicated pages will generate from search engines.
Meta Robots Noindex
You can also tweak duplicate content using meta tags. Duplicate content happens when the Tampa web design uses the same content for different pages (for example, in search filters and product categories). The intention wasn’t to fool search engines but to make the customer experience better. However, this can create confusion when search engines such as Google try to index the web pages. That’s why web developers can add the meta robots noindex to the HTML head of each page.
What these “robots” tell Google is though it can crawl the web page, it shouldn’t index it. It will not appear on the search engine results. Why let Google crawl the web page when it cannot index it? Google doesn’t like to be told not to crawl a web page. It wants to make that judgment on whether or not to index a page or not during ambiguous situations.
Recent Comments