Content Duplication Issues and SEO

This should be added in our initial SEO checklist. If your website having content which is copied from other website, then your pages will get into supplemental index of search engines and won’t rank for any of your keywords.

Mostly we are getting projects for SEO with already developed content. So it’s our task to check all the content present in the website is copyrighted. If you ignore this step, then you could not understand the reasons of not ranking even for low competition keywords.

How to find the duplicate content present in a website?

Just enter your website URL in the text box of Copyscape website. It will list the web pages having content same as you. Its not mean that you have copied the content from all the listed web pages. Following are the two possible cases,

1) Yours may have original content and the listed website may copy it.
2) Your website might copy content from the listed website.

Check the exact possibility for all the listed pages with age of the website and ARCHIVE.ORG. If it is case 1,

Apply for DMCA complaint as I described in my earlier post. You may interest to display the banner says “DO NOT COPY” in your website. You can get those banners from Copyscape. But, I am sure that you cannot prevent your content 100% with these banners.

If it is case 2,

Remove all the duplicated contents and produce some fresh contents and get some relevant quality back links. This helps you to get shift from supplemental index to main index of search engines. So be sure to add this as a crucial point in your initial check list.

Internal Duplication

The things that I explained above are duplication with other websites. Your website itself may have same content in different pages. This also will leads to penalty. So be sure in using the unique content in your web pages.

Still there are some special cases in which you don’t even realize that as a duplicate issue. You may not have a same content in your web pages.

Following are the cases,

http://www.seobyelan.com

http://seobyelan.com

http://seobyelan.com/index.php

Search engines will consider this as different URL’s but having same content. So it will come under duplication issue.

http://seobyelan.com/about-me/

http://www.seobyelan.com/about-me/

This also will leads to the same issue.

So be aware of all the above said points and enjoy good position for your keywords.