In a nutshell: What is duplicate content?
If a domain contains identical content on one or more pages, this is referred to as duplicate content (DC). To avoid a loss of ranking in the worst case scenario, website owners should avoid DC at all costs.
What is duplicate content?
Whenever certain content appears twice on several pages, search engines classify it as duplicate content. This can be identical duplicate texts as well as complete individual pages.
A distinction is also made between internal and external duplicate content. If we are talking about internal DC, the duplicate content is located on one domain. In the case of external DC, the content is distributed across several domains.
If search engines discover duplicate content, they may find it difficult to decide on the correct "original" content. As a result, such duplicate content is filtered out and can lead to a loss in ranking. For this reason, duplicate content should be avoided at all costs.
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In which situations does duplicate content occur?
There are various situations in which duplicate content appears. Examples are listed below to illustrate DC:
- URLs have their own print version with the same content
- Online stores offer their customers an additional PDF with product information. The details and descriptions are identical to the product page.
- Product pages with different product variants such as colors, shapes or sizes
- URLs can be accessed with different upper and lower case letters. Example: www.domain.com/unterseite and www.domain.com/Unterseite.
- If a website is available under several http variants such as https://, http://, http://www. or https://www. and there is no forwarding to a specific address, there is a risk of DC
- If there is a pagination in the header or footer, this can also generate duplicate content
- A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM or blog automatically creates tag pages (also known as tag clouds). Content is created on these subpages, which may appear twice.
How can duplicate content be avoided?
If you want to avoid duplicate content, there are various approaches. The most basic is probably: Don't let it get to the point where DC is created.
For this reason, it is helpful to always have an overview of the project and keep an eye on everything. If duplicate content still occurs, it makes sense to set up a 301 redirect, for example. This redirects to the URL with the original content.
But can duplicate content obviously not be avoided because, for example, different product variants represent added value for the user? In this case, a canonical link makes sense. It shows the search engine where the original content is located and links to it at the same time. This also prevents penalties.
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Conclusion: What is duplicate content?
If content such as text appears twice or three times on a domain, it does not provide the user with any added value. And search engines like Google see it the same way. For this reason, it is important to prevent duplicate content from being created. Otherwise, DC can lead to the domain being penalized and losing rankings.