Solving Duplicate Content Issues

Websites face huge challenges as far as their indexing is concerned. Duplicate content on the website has been discovered to be one of the biggest indexing challenges on the web and continues to be so, especially for content pages on the website. Although cross website duplicates are equally bad for the website performance, this article looks at some of the ways you can use to deal with duplicates at page level.

Getting rid of duplicate content on a website is hard. More so, for commercial websites which sell similar products, hand crafting duplicate content that will help you avoid duplicates is almost impossible. Therefore, what is the easiest way to deal with this kind of duplicate content?

Here are some of the steps you should consider with a large site with duplicate content.

Get the Point of Difference

When you have different pages with almost invaluable content, you need to be creative on how you write them. For instance, if you are dealing with screws on the website, is the pages are different at size level only, ensure that the meta data is full of the separate size parameters that can give a slight difference to the content page content.

Get rid of Boiler Text

One of the leading duplicate content issues on commercial websites is boiler text. This is text which is same or similar in the whole website. On content or commercial sites, boiler text could be the standard characteristic text you use to describe all the products. Consider changing these for something unique and original. You can also consider coming up with a page that separately gives the details about the materials used to create your merchandise.

Write Bespoke, Original Content

There is no better way to deal with duplicates on content pages of commercial sites than with sentence level, original content. This means that you look for new things to incorporate in the content pages for the products on the website. If possible, get additional aspects that make each product and add bulleted lists if possible to appear original. Plagspotter is one of the best platforms you can use to detect whether content is original on the website or not. Its originality detection is one of the best on the web because of its content database depth.

Canonize Product Pages

Canonicals are some of the biggest causes of duplicate content on product pages of commercial sites. Canonicalizing pages is easy with rel-canonical tags which can be incorporated in product pages with similar or near duplicate content. Some of the steps that can help you to effectively do this on a commercial website are:

• Determining pages with duplicate or totally similar content
• Getting a page you can implement the canonical tag. Consider choosing or directing to a page that is already performing well.
• Get the url you want to implement the tag to
• Implement the rel-canonical tag on the page

It’s important you note that wrongful canonical tag implementations can be costly to your website. To avoid the pitfalls you could face, ensure you go through correct tag implementation techniques from reputable platforms like SEOMOZ.