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It is always important to be aware of best practices when it comes to SEO, but you also need to know what you need to avoid. There are many factors that can harm your website’s search engine ranking, and Google is clamping down on many of these in their latest Core Update. These negative factors could also damage your brand reputation and worsen the user experience. One of these factors that you need to be aware of is duplicate content - keep reading for all you need to know and how you can avoid it.
What Is Duplicate Content?
No points for guessing this one - duplicate content is simply content that appears in more than one place online. This could be a block of text or even an entire web page. Duplicate content might seem harmless, but it can harm your business in a few ways.
Why Is Duplicate Content Bad?
Duplicate content is bad because it can harm your search engine ranking. Google prioritises giving users the most relevant and high-quality search results, so when it encounters duplicate content, it does know what to prioritise. Duplicate content can lead to SEO penalties that could harm your ranking or even cause your website to be removed from SERPs altogether.
In addition to this, you also need to consider the loss of link equity. High-quality backlinks are a key component of SEO, but you will dilute link equity when you publish the same content in different places, as links will be divided among the different publications.
Duplicate content can also be frustrating for users seeking new, unique, and valuable information. Duplicate content could harm your reputation and credibility, which can be hard to recover from.
How To Avoid Duplicate Content
The best way to avoid duplicate content is simply always to produce new, unique content. You can use content writing services UK to create a stream of fresh, original, and valuable content that will engage your target audience and improve your search engine ranking.
If your website already contains duplicate content, a smart way to avoid being penalised by Google is to use canonical tags. These tags allow you to indicate the preferred version to consolidate ranking signals and avoid the negative consequences of duplicate content.
You can also implement 301 redirects when you have multiple URLs pointing to the same content. These will redirect users and search engines to your preferred URL, which helps to consolidate link equity.
Finally, you should perform regular website audits that will help you identify duplicate content. Tools like Google Search Console can help you identify duplicate content so that you can take action and avoid facing penalties.
Every business needs to create content to improve search engine ranking, but you need to be wary of duplicate content. Duplicate content can harm your search engine ranking and could even see you removed from search results entirely. Additionally, duplicate content could harm your reputation and negatively impact the user experience. Hopefully, the advice in this post will help you avoid duplicate content to enhance your SEO efforts.
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