Preventing Duplicate Content In E-Commerce Websites

One of these algorithms was the Panda algorithm that Google launched in 2011. The purpose of this algorithm was to lower the ranking of sites with low quality, duplicate content and increase the rankings of the ones with good quality content.

Duplicate content can be disastrous especially for the SEO of e-commerce websites that are more likely to have such content. In this article, we’ll cover what duplicate content does to e-commerce platforms and how you can identify and fix it. 

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is basically a term used by SEO experts to define content that is similar to other content pieces that exist on the web. It is the content that appears on multiple locations under different URLs or domains. According to Google, duplicate content is a web copy that is word-to-word to another copy that exists on the web or is “appreciably similar” to another content. 

While a duplicate content penalty may be extremely rare, it seriously harms your search engine rankings because the search engine algorithms make sure they index and rank pages that are providing some unique information so you lose that organic traffic that you might have gotten if you were using original content. It may also lead to fewer indexed pages because sometimes search engines do not decrease the ranking of a page, they just simply don’t index. It mostly happens to e-commerce sites because they have lots of pages. 

Duplicate Content on an Ecommerce Website

There are a number of pages on eCommerce websites, therefore the chances of having duplicate content are higher. eCommerce websites normally post product descriptions and user guides that are also posted by other online shops. This type of content is often reused on multiple sites and platforms, which results in duplicate content product pages. Sometimes even the manufacturer of the product provides the product descriptions to all of its sellers, which at the end of the day results in you having similar content as your competitors. 

Is Duplicate Content Bad For SEO?

When it comes to duplicate content and SEO, a copied web copy can have a horrible impact on search engine optimization efforts. If Google recognizes and filters out the content on your website as similar to others it may drop down the ranking of your page. A web copy similar to other blocks of content on the internet can confuse Google and as a result, Google is forced to pick amongst one of those identical copies for the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs). There is a chance that Google may drop the ranking of the original copy instead of the plagiarized one. The link metric of the content would also be hard to compile, especially when the content on other web pages links to multiple versions of the content. Link equity is a valuable ranking factor, and if all the inbound links are directed towards multiple pieces of content, which divides and stretches the link equity to multiple domains, this impacts the search visibility of the pages with similar content.

Tools to Identify Duplicate Content on My Website?

Google has cited a method with which you can check whether your web pages have plagiarised content or not. You can do it using the search engine itself. Just copy the first ten lines of the content and paste it into the search bar with quotes. The only web page you should see is your own with no other results. If there are other websites on the search engine results page then Google may list the one at the top that it believes to be the original source of the content. 

While writing web copies we often take inspiration from other content pieces, which can also result in a certain level of similarity with the other content pieces. Here are some similar content checkers that you can use to avoid that:

• Copyscape: This is one of the best and most used tools to look for any duplicate content in your copy. If there is any form of similarity with other content pieces it provides the results instantaneously and will even highlight the words that are similar in the other content pieces and will show the duplicate content percentage and number of words similar at the top as well. 

• Siteliner: This tool can be used to check the content of your entire website. You can use it once a month to audit the content. It can also analyze some of the SEO aspects of the site like broken links or pages that are prominent for search engines.

• Smallseotools: It’s a free plagiarism checker that offers other tools like keyword rank checker and grammar checker as well.

• Grammarly: Grammarly is mainly used as a spelling and grammar checker but its premium package also offers plagiarism checks. 

How to Fix Duplicate Content?

The first thing that you need to do to deal with duplicate content is to specify evidently which duplicate copy is the “correct” one. If you post content that can later be found on multiple sites make sure you use the canonical tags to let the search engine know that your copy is actually the original one. You can do that using one of the three methods, 301 redirects, Google search console’s parameter handling tool, and rel=canonical attribute. 

• 301 redirects

One of the ways to tackle duplicate content is to set up 301 redirects from the duplicate copy to the original web copy. This helps amalgamate multiple pages that have the chance to perform well on the SERPs which leads to a stop in those content pieces competing with each other as well as generate a stronger relevancy signal overall. 

• Parameter handling tool

By using the Parameter handling tool in the google search console, you will be able to set the preferred domain of your site and can even dictate if Googlebot should crawl several URL parameters in a different manner. 

• Rel=canonical attribute

This is an HTML tag known as the canonical tag used to combine multiple URLs that have duplicate content and indicating which one should be crawled and indexed by the search engine crawlers. It basically specifies which content pieces amongst similar content pieces is the master copy. 

Final Word

Duplicate content can be troublesome. It can throw all your SEO and content marketing efforts down the drain. Our expert SEO auditors can help you identify any duplicate content in your current web pages and blogs and devise an action plan for you from there, so you can successfully rank high in the SERPs.