Duplicate Content - How to Check for Duplicate Content?

Duplicate Content is a hot issue in Search Engine Optimization. You may get directly or indirectly involved in Duplicate content issues. What I really mean is even though you are not involved in Duplicating content; there are others who may duplicate your website’s content. So, it is natural to have multiple pages with same content. Don’t stop here! Let us help you get rid of duplicate content to optimize your site for search engines.

Clear your concept about Duplicate content

Search engines do not penalize sites because of syndication of identical articles on other websites. If that had been the case, then there would have been single article for each website. You may have seen Article directories, websites, blog sites have duplicate content but they rank fine and they do not enter into supplemental databases. There are some legitimate reasons for considering content as Duplicate Content. Duplicate content occurs when the search bots finds identical content at different URLs.

Do search engines penalize Duplicate content?

The answer is NO! If the search bots finds ‘duplicate content’ while indexing, they only reduce the importance of that page simply by reducing the Page Rank of that website. In reality, duplicate content pages are not penalized, rather they simply filters out (remove) the unwanted and scrap content from that webpage. So there lies a difference between filter and penalty.

How search engines determine Duplicate Content?

The search engine has adopted 3 simple ways to determine Duplicate content. These are:

1. Duplicate content occurs when the search bots finds identical content at different URLs i.e websites with identical pages.

2. Duplicate content occurs when a content is taken from a website and reforming that to create a new look but eventually fails to do so, leaving it addressing as a ‘similar content’. Scraping is becoming more of a problem for search engines.

3. Duplicate content occurs when hundreds and thousands websites create more or less same product description, some of them eventually landing up with Duplicate content. This is not spamming but is it very hard to restrain from a sheer ‘Duplicate content Look’.

How to Check for Duplicate Content?

The issue of Duplicate contents has become the most critical issues, both for search engines and people, lately. Thanks to Duplicate Content Filters that the search engines have implemented. Do you know how can you determine whether your ‘precious pages’ have duplicate content or not? What are the ways you can solve it up? There are some good ways to avoid the duplicate content filter.

1. Firstly visually check your pages for duplicate content. Then analyze the similarity among webpages and modify them to make each webpage, a unique one.

2. Secondly, use tools such as ‘Similar Page Checker’ tools in the web. We recommend using this free tool from copyscape.com. Visit this website and put the url of your website and find the replicas of your webpage’s content. So you can detect who is responsible for the fraud and inform the search engines.

3. Make you site as unique as possible. Blog unique content or let the community to generate the content. Adding a blog or forum is easy to do. Let your visitors comment on your content such as blog, articles or news.

There is nothing to worry about Duplicate content. The pages will be fairly indexed by search engines regardless of its content. Like for example, if your website has 2 webpages of similar content (almost 90% content common between two pages), then it will be indexed as index (for your homepage) and index1 for the other webpage. It will not be considered as spam but the index page index page may OR may not result in supplemental index.

But if you feel that it will be difficult for that individual website to get higher rankings in the search engines having same content in 2 index pages (say), just change title, description, keywords, change some contents and you may pass through just fine.