Duplicate content

Duplicate content refers to the exact same copy of a content or content that is similar to other content. These duplicate content can be present on the webpages of the same website or on different websites. It is easy for a company specializing in SEO services in Dubai to deal with such a situation.

What is the impact of duplicate content?

Many experts debate on whether the duplicate content is a negative ranking factor for websites or not. Some say that it is indeed a negative ranking factor while the others refute their claim. Regardless of which side is right, duplicate content does have some impact on the websites that have duplicate content. Search engines aim to provide their users with unique and high-quality content, but duplicate content hinders that. That is why websites having duplicate content may get penalized or deindexed. So, if you want to improve the visibility of your website, you should make sure that your website does not have any duplicate content.

Forms of duplicate content

Duplicate content can be in various forms:

Exact duplicates

Exact duplicate content refers to the exact copy of a content that may appear on various locations on the same website or on different websites.

Near duplicates

This form of duplicates refers to the duplicate content that is not identical but somewhat similar to other content on various locations on either the same website or different websites.

Scraped content

Duplicate content is not considered intentional, however, scraped content is considered intentional copying of the content. It refers to publishing the content from other websites on your website without permission.

URL variations

URL variations occur to different URL parameters that result in duplicate content. Among these parameters, click tracking and analytics codes are the most prominent ones.

Printer-friendly pages

Websites have printer-friendly versions of their webpages that can result in duplicate content.

why is having duplicate content an issue for seo? OR
How to avoid duplicate content?

SEO experts in Dubai and other regions of the world use diverse ways to avoid duplicate content. Some of these are:

Using canonical tags

Canonical tags refer to the rel=canonical tag that is added to the HTML of the original page. If your website has many webpages that have duplicate content, it can affect the ranking of all these pages. Duplicate content causes confusion to the search engine as to which page it should rank. This confusion results in search engines not ranking all web pages with duplicate content altogether. You can avoid this from happening by adding canonical tags to the original pages. It will tell the search engine which page it should rank and all the traffic to other pages with duplicate content will be directed to this original page.

301 redirects

SEO companies in UAE use another method to fix the duplicate content issue for their websites and that is using 301 redirects. By using this, you can redirect the duplicate pages to your original page. If your websites have duplicate content on various pages, you need to decide which one of these pages you will choose as primary or original page. When you have selected your primary page, you need to set up 301 redirects on this page. When search engines crawl on this page, it will identify it as the original content and will rank it in the search results. If crawl bots land on the duplicate pages, 301 redirects will redirect them to the original page and that page will rank in search results.

Consistent linking structure

You should make sure that your website has a consistent internal linking structure. By maintaining a consistent internal linking structure, you can ensure that each page on your website has a unique and distinctive URL that will limit duplicate content on your website.

Avoiding URL parameters

SEO company in Dubai advises the website owners that they should configure their websites in a way that prevents the indexing of the URL parameters. URL parameters cause duplicate content, so by avoiding them, you can avoid this issue.

Conclusion

A company that specializes in SEO services in Dubai can easily handle such a problem. Duplicate content negatively impacts the user experience and affects the ranking of your website. That is why SEO experts in Dubai employ various strategies to deal with this issue. Strategies like canonical tags, 301 redirects, avoiding URL parameters, etc., ensure to maintain the integrity and visibility of your website.