What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content, which means “duplicate content” in French, is the reproduction of the content of a web page or a website in an identical or almost identical way on the Web. This is a phenomenon that causes problems in SEO, as search engines track and penalize pages or sites involved in duplicate content.
Duplicate content is like copying and pasting content to a different URL
It can be textual content alone on a paragraph or textual content with other elements on the whole page. When such content is deemed to be posted on another URL, with or without slight modification, it is considered duplicate content and it is the search engine that makes this “judgement”. There are two types of duplicate content.
The first involves duplicate pages within the same site, and therefore on different URLs, due to the need to make separate desktop and mobile versions of the site, or due to technical or webmaster errors. There, the content is exactly the same. This usually happens in electronics stores with product listings. The second involves duplicate pages on different sites.
This may be the result of a redistribution of an RSS feed, or an almost identical description of a similar product, or simply the fact of plagiarism. This is a phenomenon that worries many website owners. However, sometimes duplicate content is deliberately left out of necessity, in which case all you have to do is use the rel=canonical tag to indicate the source content to Google’s bots, and the page that will be considered original will be indexed.
Duplicate content is annoying for the SEO of pages on search engines
The first thing you need to know is that, except in the worst case, duplicate content does not prevent Google’s search engine from indexing relevant pages. Google is simply trying to outsmart the site by considering the same content multiple times.
Pages classified as duplicate content can lose their position in the SERPs or even be removed from search results. In any case, this can also happen when the content stealer’s PageRank is stronger, demoting the original page to the background in favor of the content stealer. In addition to 2 types of duplicate content, there are 3 cases.
The first involves the exact same page. There, only the one with the highest PageRank will be indexed.
The second is linked to similar pages, but differentiated by their title and description tags. There, all pages will be indexed, but those not considered original will appear in the SERPs only by clicking “Restart search, including skipped pages”.
The third involves the same title and description tags for different pages. There, Google may not even index pages considered duplicates. The rules to remember are: one page = different URL, and in cases where content is intentionally copied, put the URL of the original page in the canonical tag.
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