Have you ever Googled your own business and seen something odd? Maybe the same page is showing up twice, once with “www” in the URL and once without it. Or it may appear both with and without a trailing slash, sitting in the search results as though your website never quite decided which version it wanted to use.
If you’ve encountered this, it doesn’t mean your website is broken in a major way. Duplicate content is one of the most common technical SEO errors out there, and it’s often easier to resolve than it might seem when you understand what’s causing it in the first place.
What Is Considered Duplicate Content?
Despite what people think, duplicate content doesn’t mean a blog post was copied and pasted to another part of the website. It usually means Google is viewing multiple URLs that all go to the same content (despite the fact that you’ve only ever built one page).
An example of this is that your homepage can technically be accessed at yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com/, and through both the http:// and https:// versions of those URLs.
To you, that’s obviously one homepage. But to a search engine crawling your site, each URL can look like a separate page, even though the content itself is identical. That duplication can create indexing and ranking issues if the preferred version isn’t made clear.
How Does Duplicate Content Happen?
The Web, it turns out, is full of many instances of this problem happening for simple reasons:
- Variations in URLs. As we’ve discussed above, tiny variations like without and with a slash at the end, or http:// versus https://, can all technically create different URLs which lead to the same content.
- Session IDs, or tracking URLs. Some websites add more information to the end of URLs to track user behavior or data from an ad campaign which makes each URL unique for a user without actually changing the page.
- Mobile or printer-friendly versions. If you have an older website, you may have a page that is specifically formatted for printing and/or mobile use which creates another URL for the same page.
- Filtering and sorting through an online store. If you have an e-commerce store, search and filter options can generate additional URLs based on sorting the data set, even though the content behind those sorted pages is identical.
- Content that is truly duplicated on multiple pages. Sometimes it truly is the case that someone has copied the same content with only minimal changes between pages, such as changing the city name for each location page.
Why Duplicate Content Is a Problem
Why not just ignore duplicate content and call it a day? After all, the content is still there and if people search for it, it’s still findable. However, duplicate content can cause real issues.
For one, search engines can pick which version of the content they’re going to display, and it’s not necessarily going to be the one you want. It may be the one with poor formatting, that hasn’t been updated recently, or the legacy URL structure rather than the fresh one you spent hours creating.
Another issue is splitting your page’s authority. Links, page traffic, and engagement that would otherwise be built up to a single page all get split up across multiple versions, weakening the amount of authority a page has in the eyes of Google.
The Good News: Duplicate Content Is Fixable
The fix for duplicate pages isn’t rewriting your whole website, nor is it extensive design work. It’s typically adding a bit of code called a canonical tag, which politely asks search engines to note which version of the page to give the most credit to.
In addition to canonical tags, creating consistent redirects to funnel www and non-www versions, or slash and no slash versions of the same URL to one source, removing tracking parameters, and combining true duplicate pages into one more comprehensive page can also be helpful.
Find and Fix Duplicate Content Today
Your website was created to promote your business, not for you to become an SEO expert. However, if you don’t address duplicate content, it can silently hold your website back. Magna Technology can do a deep dive as part of our services to see if we find duplicate pages. We’ll investigate, clarify what’s going on, and ensure Google can see which version is the real deal. Contact us today to get a technical inspection of your website.