How Should I Address A Small Duplicate Content Issue?

One of the major concerns of website owners are the issues related to duplicate content on websites. This really becomes a problem when duplicate content websites rank higher than the sites that offered the most original content first. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Search Spam team, took the time to address the question of: “How should I address a small duplicate content issue?” Since content theft, plagiarism and idea snatching are common occurrences on the web, website owners are concerned about how such duplications affect their SEO rankings and company reputation.

What is a Duplicate Content?

Content may be considered a duplicate if that particular content appears on the web in more than one sites or locations. If this happens, search engines will have a hard time determining which versions are the original ones and which are the actual duplicates. When this happens, rankings automatically get affected.

Main points highlighted on this video:

• Google team searches for duplicate contents and will properly group them together to be treated as one set or type of content. This filters the results and narrows down searches faster.
• The sites are properly clustered to make sure that rankings do not get affected or altered.
• Google searches for spammed contents as well, such duplicates will be treated as spams and the company will definitely take the necessary actions to prevent such malicious and manipulative contents from being shown on the results pages.
• Legitimate duplicates are tolerated by Google and will not be treated as spam. Such legitimate duplicates are those contents with updated versions.

In order to increase your SEO Rankings, you should:

• Make sure that duplicate contents are there for legitimate purposes or reasons. This means that if you keep an original copy and issue its updated version with good intentions then, your rankings will not be affected in a negative way.
• Use “rel=canonical” redirect to avoid being tagged as a duplicate. This will lead your users to the right page instead.
• Filter your page’s content. If you can generalize or use a single content for a specific topic, do so. This will avoid being tagged as a duplicate or spam.

Also check out our article on 5 tips to write a good SEO article.