What Is Duplicate Content & How Do I Fix It?

Do you know if you have any duplicate content on your blog? Maybe you don’t but you may have duplicate content on another domain that you don’t know about.

If you do, Google may slap you with a ranking penalty, at worst, or filter out the duplicate content which is normally the case.

So how do i find out if i have duplicate content and either fix it or remove it? Firstly you need to understand what duplicate content is.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content means you have large blocks of content which are exactly the same or very similar on your blog or another site.

Whats Not duplicate content: Using the same excerpts on multiple pages or sourced from another domain linked back to the full post isn’t a problem.

Duplicate content can refer to the same content on your website or the same content on two or more sites.

Searchers like to discover a range of unique content which provides them with a diversity of content related to their query rather than the same results.

Examples of Duplicate Content

Generally, forums seem to provide many of the same answers which is viewed as duplicate content and most full time bloggers will have a certain degree of duplicate content within their blog posts.

Blogs generally tend to display duplicate content in multiple locations. For example, you may have a single post indexed and then also have the post category and archive indexed which means you have three permalinks to the same content indexed.

How To Check For Duplicate Content

One way to check your indexed URL’s for duplicate’s is to install an addon called Seo Doctor. This will show you all your indexed URL’s which you can go through manually to fix or remove the duplicate content itself or no index the url.

Here’s a few other ways to fix duplicate content:

Fixing Duplicate Content

There are a number of ways to deal with duplicate content.

You can:

1. Remove the content on your own site
2. Combine the content on one page
3. No Index the content
4. Rewrite the content
5. Ask for it or get it removed from Google’s index

Duplicate Content Tools for Seo

There’s many tools which you can use for free to check for duplicate content. Here’s a few of them:

• Virante Duplicate Content Tool – Checks url’s for duplicates
• Google Webmaster Tools – Checks for duplicate title tags & meta descriptions
• Duplicate Content Tool – Compares 2 URL’s for the same content
• Seo Doctor – Displays a list of all your indexed URL’s which you can check manually
• WordPress Duplicate Content Plugins – 4 Plugins which deal with duplicate content

Duplicate content isn’t a major problem unless someone else is using a scraper to steal your content and your url is filtered out and not indexed because theirs is. This is highly unlikely, but if you experience content theft, you can request a DMCA take down notice to their host or notify Google of copyright infringement.

More Duplicate Content Resources

• Yoast Seo has an excellent post on the causes of Duplicate content and how to fix them
• Here’s what Google has to say about duplicate content and how to fix it.
• You may also find this post of Fixing Duplicate Permalinks Slugs helpful as duplicate titles are a problem yet easily fixed if you use WordPress.
• SEOMoz also have several articles on duplicate content with some image examples of duplicate content.