Nowadays, one of the biggest problems in the strategy of some businesses is duplicated content on the sites. The question is - Why? Unfortunately, most of the owners think that if the URLs of the sites are completely different, it does not affect the SEO system of it. But no, it is not that easy. 

The content of a web resource is what distinguishes one site from others. Therefore, the text content must be unique. Also, the content should be useful and interesting for the Internet audience in order to attract them. In that case, duplicated content harms the whole strategy of the business and its marketing system. Let's dive into the reasons.

 First, we should know what, in fact, is the duplicated content. Duplicates are individual pages of the site, the content of which fully or partially coincides. Basically, they are lots of copies of the entire page or the specific part of it, accessible from unique URLs.

Duplicate content usually refers to individual blocks of content in domains that match or are very similar to other content. Most of the time, this content is not deceptive in origin. Examples of duplicate content that is not malicious include:

1) Discussion forums targeted at mobile devices that can create both regular and restricted pages

2) Hide items that are represented or linked by different, multiple URLs

3) Printer-only versions of web pages

Yes, I agree, it might be happened unintentionally, as another option might be caused by poor technical implementation, but duplicate content is a problem that affects millions of websites on the Internet. 

Why is duplicated content bad for SEO and Google?

We must understand that duplicated content first affects Google and the SEO system. If you're wondering how it affects the rankings, then you have come to the right place.

There is so much content in the world. By comparison, Google only knows a small part of it. To tell if your site's content has been copied or not, Google would need to know every paper ever written, which is impossible.

When you publish something on your website, it takes some time for Google to crawl and index it. If your site is popular and you post content frequently, Google will crawl your site more often. This means it can index content sooner. Do you want to see the same thing ten times when you search for something on Google? Of course not! You want different products so you can choose properly. You want various opinions so you can form your own ideas.

 How to check duplicate content? 

On store websites, duplicate content continues to be a major barrier to growing organic search traffic. In comparison to other marketing initiatives like link building, content marketing, or content promotion, managing duplicate material has the following advantages for improving SEO performance:

-The duplicated content consolidation can be executed quickly as it requires a small number of technical changes;

- You will most likely see improvement in rankings after the fix within a few weeks.

-Google picks up new changes and improvements to your site faster because it needs to crawl and index fewer pages than before.

Combining duplicate content isn't about avoiding Google's penalties. It's about connecting. Links are valuable for SEO performance, but they won't help you if links end up on duplicate pages. They are wasted.

If you want to determine whether your site has duplicate content, type Google yoursitename.com and just control how many pages are listed there.

If Google lists many more pages than the products you have, your site likely has duplicate content.

Does duplicate content hurt SEO?

Although it is not precisely a result of the penalty, duplicating material can occasionally have a negative impact on search engine results. According to Google, it can be challenging for search engines to determine which version of many pieces of "pretty similar" information in various locations on the Internet is more pertinent to a given search query.

Why is Duplicate Content Important for SEO?

For search engines duplicate content can cause three main problems for search engines;

1- It doesn't know what content to include/exclude in its indexes.

2- It doesn't know whether to redirect the link metrics (like trust, authority, anchor text, link equality and etc.) to the page or keep them separate between the multiple versions.

3- It doesn't know which content to rank for query results.

But in the case of site owners:

Duplicate content can cause site owners to lose visitors and rankings. These losses are often caused by two key issues:

1- To provide the best search experience, search engines will seldom display multiple versions of the same content and therefore have to choose which content will yield the best results. This causes traffic loss for each content that duplicates exist.

2- Content with a similar number of links may lose more traffic because other sites have to choose between duplicates. Instead of all inbound links to a piece of content, they link to multiple pieces and spread link equity across replicas. Since inbound links are a ranking factor, this can affect later the search visibility of duplicate content.

Google penalties for duplicate content:

The penalties imposed on websites by Google and to what extent no one exactly knows them. I would like to point this out. For this reason, the types of Google Penalties that we will talk about will be penalties that we encounter frequently, that happen to many webmasters, and that solutions are sought on various platforms. Suppose there is a significant loss in organic traffic and a decrease in the rank of the keywords seen with the loss of visitors and traffic after any Google algorithm update. In that case, it should be briefly considered as a Google penalty.

Types of Google Penalties:

Types of Google Penalties, Site contents Pages created to deceive users, and types of sanctions for sites by Google against excessive SEO to the site. We can examine the types of Google Penalties in two different types of penalties in general. There are manual penalties and algorithm penalties.

Manual penalties: Manual action, as the name suggests, is given the name of the types of penalties applied by natural persons to all or certain pages of websites.

When Google takes a manual action on your site:

-Your site's ranking may drop,

-Your rich results may not appear in the SERP,

-Your site's indexes can be deleted,

-Your organic conversion rates may decrease,

-You may experience a decrease in your organic traffic.

-If you're on platforms like Google News, inbound traffic may stall.

 It will be beneficial for you to take note of the date of manual action and the dates when the penalty is lifted. Your traffic may drop suddenly after manual action.

Algorithm penalties- The subject of Google algorithms is a little ink. The main reason for this is that Google does not give us much information on this subject. In other words, it's not hard to understand whether you've been penalized by Google or not. You can derive some results based on the traffic impulse in your Google Search Console account or the specific traffic impulse in Google Analytics.

The most effective way to avoid knowing that you have received a Google algorithm report is to compare the time interval that the Google algorithm change starts with when you push traffic.

Copy Content Penalty- Many sites have been penalized by Google for copying too much and have been pushed back. If a site chooses to publish copy content instead of original content since its installation, it will send it back to invisible in a short time. Even if Google shows the site with duplicate content on the 1st page in a word, it does not allow it to rise to the top. You know, there is now a metric called TrustRank. Since sites with duplicate content cannot have Trustrank, they will never rank higher. On the other hand, some sites shared original and quality content in the early days and rose to the top in the target world, but if they make the mistake of adding duplicate content later on, they may slide to the lower ranks in their target words. The reason for this is the decrease in the Trustrank value.

 How much duplicate content is acceptable?

The problem caused by duplicate web content is traffic reduction. Duplicate content also leads to altered rankings in search engines. The search engine uses a certain algorithm to filter the original content. Now, if any two websites are alike, either one automatically loses credibility. The algorithm will be responsible for this. However, this result will be quite harmful as it will lower the ranking of one of the two sites. Copyleaks ensures that this does not happen and that it does not ruin your reputation, career, and business. That's why they use advanced technology to routinely search billions of different content pages.

How Are These Results Used?

It's okay to start with internal duplicate content issues. To get rid of the same content, use the following methods:

-Remove duplicate text content from web pages/blog posts.

-Redirect pages to the main website to eliminate multiple version issues.

-Avoid using copied content.

-Fix broken internal links.

-Don't use indexes and don't use tracking meta tags.

But how does Google determine the primary version of duplicated content?

Google uses two different browsers to browse websites: mobile browser and desktop browser. Each browser type tries to show the user visiting the page using that device type.

Google uses a single browser type (mobile or desktop) as the primary browser for your site. All pages crawled by Google on your site are crawled using the primary browser. The primary browser for all new websites is the mobile browser.

Also, Google will recrawl several pages on your site with another browser type (mobile or desktop). This process, called secondary crawling, is done to see how well your site is doing with the other device type.

To conclude, we must understand that duplicated content has a strong drawback on the site and to all the strategies you would like to apply to your business. The main rule here is to avoid this situation.