4 ways to avoid problems with duplicate content

Duplicate content is a problem that many website owners face. This is because having too much of this duplicate content can lead to problems with search engine crawlers. Search engines like Google have become quite adept at detecting duplicate content and penalising websites. In fact, duplicate content can be a red flag to the crawler that the site is not trustworthy. There are several ways by which you get duplicate content on your website, but fortunately also several ways by which you can prevent it from happening again in the future.

1. Check and double-check your content before publishing

If you write your own website content, it is important to check each piece of content for possible duplicate content issues before publishing it. Although you may have already carefully read what you have written and edited it for errors and mistakes, it is important to do one last check for duplicate content before publishing it. Perhaps you have used the same words or phrases in two or three places on your website, and are they too similar to cause problems for your website? It can be challenging to check for duplicate content, but it is important to be thorough.

2. Keep your title tags and meta descriptions unique

The title tag and meta description are two of the most important onder parts of your website. They appear in search engine results and are used for click-through rates. For this reason, you want to make sure that all title tags and meta descriptions are unique. If you have the same title tags and/or meta descriptions for multiple pages on your website, you could run into trouble. So make sure you change any title tags or meta descriptions that are too similar.

3. Don't use the same URL for multiple pages

This is an important point. Using the same URL for multiple pages can be a problem. It is a problem because, especially if the content of the URL is too similar to the other URLs on your site, it can signal to search engine crawlers that you are trying to trick them. 
So don't use the same URL for multiple pages on your website. You can always create a new URL for one or more pages on your site. You can do this by creating a new page with content that does not yet have a URL, or by linking to it from an existing page with a different URL.

4. Be careful when aggregating content from different sources

If you create new content based on multiple sources, be careful when merging those sources. In some cases, you may have inadvertently created duplicate content by merging content from different sources. If you see that content from multiple sources is too similar, you should remove the source contributing to the problem, or create a new page with a different source.

Conclusion

Duplicate content is something many website owners face, but it is something that can be avoided. With the tips above, you can easily avoid these common problems and keep your content unique. At the same time, you can use the tips to identify where you have accidentally created duplicate content on your website and clean it up.

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Earlier, we wrote about what duplicate content is and shared another 8 tips to solve duplicate content.

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