One of the frequent challenges faced by digital marketers and website owners is that of duplicate content. People usually fail to understand duplicate content and its adverse effects just because they don't know how to avoid it.
This is because the effects are quite subtle, and you have a significantly less reaction time before you are deranked or worse are deindexed.
This guest article is going to help you understand all about duplicate content and all the relative subfactors. In today's post, we are also going to dispel a few myths about plagiarism and duplicate content which would help you in keeping at the right side of Google's guideline.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is also known as plagiarized content. The modern definition of duplicate content is that it is the substantive block of content that matches another source within or across different domains.
The content can be completely similar and can also be appreciably or relatively similar. Now the question is how does duplicate content affect a website? Before telling you the answer to how, please read about some of the common examples of plagiarism.
- Ecommerce product description, the generic descriptions of different kinds of products available on more than one selling platform can result in plagiarism.
- Using the same page and the same content in multiple areas of your website. Usually, this is done when a person starts a new website.
- More than one service-pages on your website, which are similar to each other, can be accused of duplication.
- Owning several domains is yet another case in which plagiarism can indeed exist.
- And lastly and most unethical example is that if you are copying content deliberately from another source or vice versa.
Why should you care about duplicate content?
According to Google, there is no penalty/fine for duplicate content, and it can happily index it on its results pages.
Google would duplicate index content, and there is no doubt about it, but at the same time you must know that with duplicate content you cannot get to the top ranks nor you can experience any growth.
The Google guidelines are very clear about the quality and the originality of website content.
This isn't very clear but let us explain why the ranking factor directly depends on the originality of the content.
Consider content as A and another one as B! if A and B content are entirely similar to each other, then B cannot be ranked over A content, and this is where the problem begins. Duplicate content or plagiarism confuses the search engine.
The algorithms of the search engine have nothing to do with the date and time of publishing, they only figure out the unique content on the site and based on this analysis, the ranking takes place.
If two pages or two sites for that matter are sharing the same content, then Google or any other search engine would put both of the platforms down in the lower ranks.
This is what is bad for your website health and overall seo score. Even if you are on the other end (if the content is plagiarized from you), you would suffer from the same adverse effects, and this is the reason that you have to check and monitor your site and content for duplication.
How to check for duplicate content on your site?
If you want to monitor your website regularly for duplication or plagiarism, then must surely hook yourself with an excellent tool.
There are more than hundreds of free and paid plagiarism checker services on the web that can help you in checking content for duplication.
But unfortunately, not all of them can produce accurate results, and this is the reason we recommend you to hook yourself up with the best plagiarism checker tools which use AI to check and scan your work.
The plagiarism checker tools which are of good reputation are the ones that can analyze your content and split it first before checking it.
A content that has been split into hundreds of small phrases can be easily checked for plagiarism, and this is what you need to make sure that the content that you have created is free of both intentional and unintentional plagiarism.
Some excellent plagiarism checker tools!
Here are some of the plagiarism checker tools that can help you check new content as well as your complete website if you are suffering from an unusual decrease in ranks!
- Free plagiarism checker by SearchEngineReports.net is the best online tool for writers, students and every person related to content writing.
- The plagiarismdetector.net is the best one for scanning and fixing newly prepared work for plagiarism.
- The online plagiarism checker by com is another online tool that has expertise in checking complete websites for duplication.
You can give these tools a shot and use the one that suits you the most!
Meet the Author: Ahsan Arshad
Ahsan Arshad is the Founder and CEO at Ranking Tricks, a Tech company. He is passionate about his fellow humans and wants to be their inspiration for growth, as they find their way through the dark to their true self.
He’s been a content marketer for over 5 years and writes for many other publications on blogging and website strategy.
