Duplicate content refers to a significant portion of identical content existing within the same domain or spread across multiple domains.
If you are a blogger, you have likely encountered the concept of “duplicate content in SEO”.
Bloggers typically fall into two categories: those who create original content and those who scrape content from other sources.
As long as you belong to the former category, you need not worry about Google penalties.
However, you may still face the issue of others stealing and profiting from your content while you put in the effort to produce original, high-quality posts.
You have the option to either let Google handle the issue or take action to combat content scrapers.
If you choose to ignore them, more and more blogs may plagiarize your work.
It’s important to distinguish intentional content theft from cases where writers unknowingly contribute plagiarized content.
Regardless, it is advisable to use a tool like Copyscape to check your articles, as failing to do so could harm your brand.
Why Should You Not Copy Content In Mighty Google:
First, we’ll start with why you should not let the giants of the search, Google, handle content thieves.
Though Google says that it will penalize sites or blogs that have duplicate content within or across domains, many blogs are doing this and escaping the penalty.
There are thousands of websites that have the same article going.
Have you ever heard about article directories? They are one of the biggest examples of duplicate content.
I’m not blaming the article directory owners or the article marketers who do it right, but there are always people who try to game the system.
Pick up an article that is doing very well in a particular article directory and put it in Copyscape.
What do you find? Duplicate content. Or go to Problogger, copy a headline from one of the posts, and search for it on Google.
You’ll find all the blogs stealing every single post written at Problogger.
Darren Rowse has written about duplicate content before. His blog is very popular and is naturally a target for blog scrapers. I have had my content copied before.
Kevin of Blogging Tips has written about content theft a few times before, like Social Rank – The New Breed Of Blog Scraping and Don’t Get Stressed About Blog Scrapers Stealing Your Content.
The worst part is that these scrapers still get their blog posts indexed in search engines and receive traffic.
The main reason is that millions of sites have duplicate content, and Google cannot take action on every one of them.
So, I don’t think Google can do much about duplicate content, at least not until they come up with a new idea to stop this.
For the bloggers who work their sweat off to write articles only to find it in some other blog word-for-word copied using the RSS feed of your blog, here is a way to stop RSS feed scrapers from stealing your content.
I don’t know of a way to stop copy-paste method using a plugin. Let me know if you have a solution for it. If you don’t like to take action, at least get something out of their work.
Install RSS footer plugin and get a backlink from them. This will at least let Google know that your content is the original one.
I personally don’t like people who do it and normally advise everyone not to do it. But when Google cannot stop people, I don’t expect the world to change by listening to me.
The Different Types of Duplicate Content
There are two types of duplicate content: internal duplicate content and external duplicate content.
Internal duplicate content is when you have the same article duplicated on your blog.
It’s a very bad idea to have some articles on different pages of your blog.
It is even worse when the same article appears again in a different category. This creates duplicate content within your blog, and Google hates it.
External duplicate content occurs when the same article is published on different blogs.
This is very common and easy to do if you are using content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, etc.
Most people copy-paste their articles after publishing them or write an article based on another article they had read earlier.
Why Duplicate Content Might Cause an Issue with the Ranking?
Google dislikes duplicate content because it can confuse.
For example, if your website has two text links leading to different destinations but conveying the same signal, it confuses search engines.
They struggle to determine which link is more relevant.
To address this issue, you can either have both links point to the same destination, consolidating all ranking signals or eliminate one link and make the other exclusive by adding a “no follow” attribute to it.
When the same article appears on both your blog and someone else’s blog, Google has no reason to index both, as the content is identical.
Consequently, the other blog may receive credit and higher rankings, potentially causing your site to lose traffic and rankings.
This can occur if the other blog has a higher page rank or if the article is more popular.
Is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?
Duplicate content makes it hard for Google to rank the page.
It can confuse Google and make it so that your original content is not on top of the search results.
It can cause your blog to lose revenue.
Google doesn’t like it because you are sending them the same signals twice, so they don’t know which one is the best result for the search query.
How To Check for Duplicate Content in SEO?
If you have web pages with lots of content that are declining in their search engine rankings, then you should check if your content has been copied and used on another website.
Here are some ways to do this:
1. Exact Match Search Using Google
Copy a section of text from the content and paste it into the search engine results box in quotations.
If the search engine gives multiple results, then the text you have used might be copied by others.
2. Copyscape
Go to Copyscape and enter your website URL in the search bar.
If other sites have the same content, they will be listed on the search results page.
If you see other websites with your content, contact them and ask them to give credit for your content or remove it completely if they don’t give credit.
What Can You And I Do About It?
Before we begin, here is a video by Neil Patel on some duplicate content hacks:
You have every right to your content, and you cannot let others use it on their own.
Most people steal content to earn money from AdSense or sell affiliate products.
Report to the owner of the product that these scrapers are promoting and get their affiliate link invalid. That way, they won’t earn money.
If they use AdSense, you can get their account banned by contacting Google. But still, your content remains in their blog.
Now, you can report to the hosting provider where the blog is hosted. You can find where the blog is hosted using this site.
Once you find the host, complain to them and show them the proof. They will most likely take down the site.
You can also follow any of these ten ways to fight back content thieves.
If you take a moment to get help from your followers to bring down the site, you can pull down the site faster.
I’m sure Darren Rowse can get all the sites that steal his content in a single tweet. Think about it. Almost every hosting provider is there on Twitter.
If someone tweets something like “@hostprovider This blog at Loser.com is scraping my blog’s content at Rockstar.Com”, and many people retweet the message, you can instantly get in touch with the hosting provider.
Sometimes, you don’t even need your followers to retweet. Now, all you need to do is prove to them that you are the real owner of the content.
It only takes a minute to do this. Don’t let others steal your content.
Quick Links:
- Simple Ways To Improve Your SEO
- How to Optimize Your Anchor Text Strategy For SEO?
- Powerful SEO Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts
- Beginning Blogging Mistakes You Can Fix
Conclusion: Duplicate Content In SEO 2024
Duplicate content is one reason Google can ban your site. It seems that when you address the problem, the ban automatically ends.
Many people don’t understand exactly what duplicate content means in SEO and how it affects search engine ranking.
If you are unsure whether another website has copied your blog content, go to Copyscape and check if any other site has used it.
Have you had your blog content scraped? What did you do about it? Please share your views in the comments.
If you found this post to be useful, please share it with your friends and tweet it to your followers.
