Duplicate Content on Your Own Site - Clarification?

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  • SEO
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Hey guys,

So I'm reading up about duplicate content on a blog as I'm looking to re-design my one. I came across this article which says -

"Contrary to popular belief, duplicate content is not syndicating the same article to several directories. Duplicate content happens when Google finds different paths to the same content on your site.

For instance, the same post on your blog can be accessed via the main post page, category, archives - by month, day, year, whatever, etc. We the readers understand that it's still the same article and have no problem finding it different ways."

I would have thought that if it's content on MY site, and always on THE SAME url, it wouldn't be duplicate content just because they are several ways to get to it?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Alex
#clarification #content #duplicate #site
  • Profile picture of the author wardvincent
    Hi Alex,

    Both internal & external duplicate content might negatively affect the performance of the website in google.

    Here i believe you are taking about the internal duplicate content. This is a scenario where the same content is available in multiple urls in your website.

    eCommerce website are most prone for these types of duplicate content. Blogs in your website might also cause this.

    A simple way to avoid this scenario is to add a canonical link to the original page in the <head> section of the duplicate pages.

    For example:

    if the url of one of your blog is https://example.com/blog/xyz & the same is available under the tag https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz all you need to do to avoid duplicate is to add the original page link as canonical in the <head> section of the tag page

    ie.. to add "<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/xyz" />" above </head tag in the duplicate page https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz. This will help the bots to understand that this is a copy page.

    Hope this help.
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    • Profile picture of the author anhvu
      Originally Posted by wardvincent View Post

      Hi Alex,

      Both internal & external duplicate content might negatively affect the performance of the website in google.

      Here i believe you are taking about the internal duplicate content. This is a scenario where the same content is available in multiple urls in your website.

      eCommerce website are most prone for these types of duplicate content. Blogs in your website might also cause this.

      A simple way to avoid this scenario is to add a canonical link to the original page in the <head> section of the duplicate pages.

      For example:

      if the url of one of your blog is https://example.com/blog/xyz & the same is available under the tag https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz all you need to do to avoid duplicate is to add the original page link as canonical in the <head> section of the tag page

      ie.. to add "<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/xyz" />" above </head tag in the duplicate page https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz. This will help the bots to understand that this is a copy page.

      Hope this help.
      Thanks for useful post
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    • Profile picture of the author Hillwalk Tours
      Originally Posted by wardvincent View Post

      Hi Alex,

      Both internal & external duplicate content might negatively affect the performance of the website in google.

      Here i believe you are taking about the internal duplicate content. This is a scenario where the same content is available in multiple urls in your website.

      eCommerce website are most prone for these types of duplicate content. Blogs in your website might also cause this.

      A simple way to avoid this scenario is to add a canonical link to the original page in the <head> section of the duplicate pages.

      For example:

      if the url of one of your blog is https://example.com/blog/xyz & the same is available under the tag https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz all you need to do to avoid duplicate is to add the original page link as canonical in the <head> section of the tag page

      ie.. to add "<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/xyz" />" above </head tag in the duplicate page https://example.com/blog/tag/xyz. This will help the bots to understand that this is a copy page.

      Hope this help.
      Thanks a million, that was really helpful
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[10769223].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author dave_hermansen
    Wardvincent is entirely correct. On-site duplicate content can definitely be a problem. From a search engine's perspective, they do not want to take up valuable server resources indexing the same content over and over again. When a site is not using canonical tags, the search engine does not know which URL version of the same exact page to index and in some cases, they choose to index none of them.

    One of the major annoyances we had with the BigCommerce software is they did not utilize canonical tags for the shopping cart created pages of duplicate content (sort by ... and Page 2, 3, 4 of categories, for instance). They also did not allow access to the <head> on a page by page basis, so there was no way to fix the canonical problem with their shopping cart. Fortunately, we have not run into this problem with 3DCart.

    There is another type of duplicate content that frequently appears on eCommerce sites, though. Plenty of people copy the same boilerplate content on multiple product pages. Their blue ACDC t-shirt has the same exact description as their red ACDC t-shirt. Every product page has the same 100 words of text about why to buy from them. You can get away with some of the text being the same as long as there are a couple paragraphs of utterly unique content for each product in addition to that "templated copy" that appears on pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author emodafinil
    Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

    Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
    Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
    Printer-only versions of web pages
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