Work With Search Engines To Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content negatively impacts user experience because it keeps taking users back to the same content because of an inadvertent or deliberate action. Use the suggestions below to best achieve your desires for your business to have a good ranking and the goal of maintaining a positive user experience.



Self-interest should prompt website owners and blog owners to avoid duplicate content because it can divide your traffic and drop your ranking by having different routes to bring users to your same content page.



Users can lose confidence in the value of your content if they are continually brought to the same information on your site. By now many internet users have had this experience and it's frustrating at least and frequently creates the impression that you're deliberately "tricking" users into reaching your same material in different ways.



Use tools provided by search engines for avoiding duplicate content. One such tool is frequently termed as a canonical link or tag. By identifying a canonical link you choose the preferred URL for search engines to use even if you have slight differences in URLs that are resulting in duplicate content. The canonical tag will essentially inform a search engine of the preferred site to take a user to by identifying the site with the preferred URL. In this way the canonical tag works similarly to a redirect.



With the addition of pages generated for mobile devices, you run increased risk of having duplicate content as you try to adapt your pages for the small-screen. The use of canonical links can be helpful in avoiding duplicate content problems as well as parameter tools that are designed to inform search engines about the differences between your duplicate-content sites such as the size of its display.



Consider using a 301 redirect message to correct the problem of duplicate content. The information of how to use a 301 redirect will vary depending on the software used by your web hosting service.



You can consider using a 404 error page instead of a redirect page to remove duplicate content from your site. Your web hosting service should be able to provide you with guidance on how to achieve this goal.



Mistakes happen, so commit to having periodic site maintenance. If your site has been up awhile and has many pages, you can search your site to try to check to  see whether you have duplicate pages.



Familiarize yourself with what qualifies as duplicate content. There are times when you won't even realize that you run the risk of creating duplicate content. For instance, if you're trying to improve user experience by having "printer-friendly" versions of your pages, you're actually running the risk of generating duplicate content.



Avoiding duplicate content on your website will help preserve the trustworthiness and usability of your site as well as preserving your other search engine optimization efforts by reducing the likelihood that you will divide your website traffic, turn them off or face discipline by search engines for having duplicate content. Use the tips above for identifying and correcting problems of duplicate content.