Duplicate content is something that is affecting the performance of miliions of websites and esppecially because Google frowns at it, it is worth given some attention to address. In this post, you will learn about duplicate content, what it is and how you can fix it in specific cases.

1. What Is Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is simply the content you use on your website which has been already written by someone, somewhere else. So, if you copy a piece of content off one website, paste and then publish it on your website, then you have duplicate content. Google frowns at it as it represents some form or attempt to manipulate the Search Engines.

Duplicate content is one major behavior which affect website quality, it has many sides and can be caused by many things. It could be due to some technical difficulties or unintentional mistakes and can also be a deliberate action. Before we move on to greater details, let us first understand what content duplication actually is.

On the web, duplicate content is when the same (or very similar) content is found on at least two different URLs.

One key thing here to keep in mind is that the content is already on Google indexed pages. Again, even though the content could appear on another website, if Google doesn’t have the original version of the copied content in its index, then it can’t really consider it duplicate content, even though it is!

Another take away here is that old content which is completely revamped using some content management software, turning them and the images into text and then using may not be right from a copyright point of view, but it should pass Google’s duplication filters. This wouldn't be encouraged but Google is not likely to see it as duplicate content.

I would actually recommend publications which are moving from print to digital should repurpose old content in their magazines on their websites.

We know Google loves quality content on websites. So, for evergreen contents that is not yet indexed and is still is new and original, you can publish it and not incure any penalty for duplicate content.

Furthermore, you can modify an existing content, enrich it and turn it into something like How people used to do optimize websites in the 90s’. You can keep the content identical this way (although a small original introduction might be required) and it will still pass the duplicate content test. The discussion on what amounts to duplicate content is big and ongong.

The other big issue is what is the solution to duplicate content. It is important to understand that there isn’t one single solution for fixing duplicate content issues. This is because there are very many scenarios representing content duplication. And so, there are multiple solutions and one of them might be better than the other. We will look further into these solutions and problems and hope that we can provide answers to most of the uestions you will have on content duplication.

However, we must first get some other things clear to better understand the nature of duplicate content. Then we will analyze different scenarios and give solutions for each and every one of them.

2. How Google Handles Duplicate Content

There’s a lot of content out there in the world. Compared to that, Google knows only about a small part of it. To be able to truly say if the content on your site has been copied, Google would have to know every piece of paper that has ever been written, which is impossible.

When you publish something on your website, it takes a while for Google to crawl and index it. If your site is popular and you publish content often, Google will crawl it more often. This means it can index the content sooner.

If you publish rarely, Google will probably not crawl your site so often and it might not index the content very quickly. Once a piece of content is indexed, Google can then relate other content to it to see if it’s duplicate or not.

Read full blog post at https://www.todhost.com/blog/effects-of-duplicate-content-on-seo-and-google-rankings.html