7 Duplicate Content Issues You Need To Fix Now              

How to check plagiarism?

Plagiarism is a form of copied content that also involves modification of content. Paraphrasing offers the option to modify written content, and poorly developed sites take undue advantage of a paraphrasing tool to make a slightly different version of a piece of content.

Websites that have scraped content is filled with copied matter. To check for plagiarism, a person can use the best online plagiarism checker which is available at Copyleaks.

Differentiating between plagiarized and duplicate content

The issue of similar content on the internet is well-known. Duplicate content is not always the product of blatant plagiarism. To handle duplicate content problems, it is essential to understand the difference between plagiarized content and duplicate content. A brief delineation of both is given below:

• Plagiarized content

It includes content that does not have any reference to the original content. Online journals and e-books provide enough substance for reference work. Articles on blogs and websites also act as reference material. When the reference is not mentioned appropriately due to deliberate copying, then it is termed as plagiarism.

Unintentional mistakes also lead to plagiarism. Reusing previous work without mentioning the original version is self-plagiarism. An online plagiarism checker is used to detect such issues. Text compare, which is a compare tool, aids in detecting self-plagiarism.

Know the Difference between Plagiarism and Duplicate Content

• Duplicate content

Duplicate content is not just limited to copy-paste content. The search engines decide on the parameters of fake content in an online platform. Duplicate content SEO is necessary to detect a duplicate page.

During the search for relevant results, content that appears similar to the search engine is designated as a duplicate content.

The search engine shows the most authoritative version of the content instead of showing the multiple versions. Duplicate content checker helps in filtering out copies of content on a site on the internet

Understanding and tackling the problems caused by content cloning

Google search console provides data regarding website performance and fixing issues related to ranking and duplicate pages.

To overcome the issue of duplication of the website content, it is necessary to understand the ways that allow search engines to define content as a duplicate page. Content duplication takes place in the following ways:

• Multiple domains of a website:

A website with more than one domain is quite common. The multiple versions can be a result of the extension like .com or .org. Changing the non-secure HTTP site to a secure HTTPS version is a prudent decision, but if both versions are kept functional, then one is treated as the duplicate copy of the other.

Similarly, the WWW and non-WWW version are considered as copies. There is no duplicate content penalty for this, but such issues lower the ranking of the main website.

The solution to this problem involves setting a preference for WWW or non-WWW version. Canonical tags point out the authentic version of a website. Using this tag doesn’t hamper user interaction.

301 Redirect can help in Giving Solution to the Problem of Plagiarized Content

It is used for streamlining search query generated ranking for the primary site. The 301 redirect option also works to eliminate the loss of traffic due to duplicate pages.

• Website version for different devices

There are a variety of devices that are used for browsing. The website designers enable usability tests to develop diverse versions of a webpage for better user experience. However, this also creates the problem of duplicate text files as all the versions have highly similar content.

The presence of a canonical tag prevents different website versions from turning into duplicate web pages. The canonical tag is used to set the original version of the site. It helps the original version to collect the ranking signals.

• Website variation for international users

The homepage of a website has to be tweaked to accommodate users from different countries. The content on the website doesn’t change, but the version changes as per the country.

Hreflang Tag Should be Used By the Designers

It propels search engines to treat the country-wise websites as different from each other, thereby giving rise to duplicate content. The addition of hreflang tag by website designers points out country-specific website version for search engines.

• Adding tags to URL

Content testing tools for upgrading user experience often alter URL parameters by creating slightly variable versions of the URL. It renders each version as a separate entity with similar content.

The canonical tag helps bots to crawl the right URL and renders it as the sole receiver of backlinks.

• Repetitive content

It is not the same as the copied content. Category pages of products are often copied and used by multiple sellers on the e-commerce platform. The repetition of the content prompts search engines to choose only one version.

Writing Unique Content To Avoid Plagiarism

To avoid this problem, create unique descriptive pieces for products and/or ensure additional unique content on the webpage so that search engines do not treat the page as a duplicate copy.

• Content promotion

Placing content in different sites for garnering more viewers can get the original site is deemed as a duplicate by search engines.

To avoid this problem, the shared content must have a rel=canonical tag when it is used on a third party website.

• Content stealing

it is a well-known problem where scrapers steal original content. However, ranking can go haywire for the original site because it gets designated as a cloned copy. This issue is a form of copyright infringement, and therefore it can be reported to Google.

Conclusion

A plagiarism checker helps to detect scraping content. Copyleaks software efficiently handles plagiarism issues in content. Lack of quality content and duplication of web pages effectively lowers the ranking of a website.

Solving duplicate content issues as early as possible helps in improving search engine rankings. Therefore, meticulous observation of performance parameters and continuous optimization are required to eliminate duplicate content.