Duplicate Content harms SEO. You should adopt Canonical Tags

November 10, 2021

Duplicate Content harms SEO. You should adopt Canonical Tags

How to improve the quality of the website to attract more visitors? It is a daily task for all digital marketers. As is well-known, content is king and the marketing team consistently create appealing content. Marketers also attempt to public the content in multiple channels to impress and drive traffic. Sometimes, they may acquiesce the plagiarism because they believe the quality of the content is approved. However, duplicate content impacts your SEO negatively.

Duplicate Content

The definition of duplicate content means that the same or very similar content can be found on two different URLs. The reasons for this phenomenon include internal and external factors.

Internal Factors

Some products are removed when you adjust or upload. However, it may still retain the entrance to go to the blank page.
You may just copy and paste the product information provided by suppliers or the product information is duplicated with the platforms of the third party, such as eBay, Amazon or TradeMe, etc.
The new content may be not combined with expired content on the blog page, which result in high content similarity
The same content is used for the various product categories under the different URL

External Factors

The content is maliciously plagiarised

How does Duplicate Content harm SEO

1. Your content is similar or identical to that of another website, but it may have a higher rank than you, even if you are the original author.

2. Search engines score web pages for relevance, quality and weight to provide a final ranking. If there is too much duplicate content, the weight will be distributed to different pages and diluted.

3. The chance of appearing on SERP may reduce. The same content does not appear on the same SERP. Google tends to create a better user search experience. Therefore, the search engine identifies and filters out the same content, and only one result is displayed.

4. The time for search engines to crawl content on a website is limited, and plenty of repeated content will occupy the crawl resource. The most important content cannot be crawled at the end.

Adopt Canonical Tags

A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code that can define duplicate or content with high similarity. You can adopt a canonical tag to specify the original page. It is equivalent to labelling the source of the content. When search engines find the rel=canonical tag, they target the index to the main version that you would like search engines to index.

The Canonical URL is written in the syntax of HTML as

The following are important considerations when you set up and adopt Canonical URLs

Canonical tags are placed within the <head> section of a web page.
Add the absolute URL after the canonical code, which must have the full information for the resource, in lower case
If it is an e-commerce web page, you can add the particular product page after the code, <link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com/sample-page/” />
Avoid using Canonical Tags too many times and Google will simply ignore them all
You can set up a 301 redirect diverting traffic from duplicate URLs to the original page

The cause of duplicate content is not necessarily intentional, and optimization of the content may be overlooked during busy product updates. The right Canonical Tags can significantly reduce the amount of negative influence for SEO caused by duplicate content. While learning to use Canonical Tags, you also need to pursue the quality of content. If you need to create and evaluate the content, optimize your search engine, or adopt Canonical Tags, please contact Webzilla for professional help and customized strategy.