Five examples of duplicate content and their solutions

The duplicate content is something that very few sites, most of the time, are fought not even intentional, created by our content manager.

Other types of duplicate content are deliberate and can negatively affect the web.

Sometimes having duplicate content can have unexpected reactions.

What you need to know about duplicate content, in a very summary way, is that it occurs when the same content

appears in multiple URLs and that in principle it is not a reason for penalization, unless a high percentage of your website has duplicate content.

Having a few duplicate pages won’t make Google mad at us, but avoiding it will give you clues that we’re on the right track.

Although it does not imply a penalty, it can generate a loss of positioning potential because the search engines do not

know which are the most relevant pages for a given search. Below I will try some examples of duplicate content or

questionable content and how to fix them:

Canonicalization of the page

It is the most common reason for duplicate content or questionable content.

It occurs when your home page has more than one URL:

• example.com
• https://www.example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html

Each of the previous ones leads to the same page with the same content,

having them without any redirection makes the search engine not know which one you want to direct people.

Solution

You have two options:

Does a redirect on the server to make sure there is only one page that is displayed to users?

Define which subdomain you want to be the primary (“www” or “non-www”) in Google Webmaster Tools.

Tags and categories

This occurs in blogs when many tags or category pages have the same content as other pages (something very, very common in the world of blogging).

For example, we have a blog with three posts that has subsequent tags and categories:

• Title: How to fix duplicate content
• Tags: Duplicate Content, SEO, Tips
• Categories: SEO, tips, content
• Title: How to detect duplicate content
• Tags: duplicate content, SEO, content
• Categories: SEO, content
• Title: Tips for creating quality content
• Tags: tips, content, quality content
• Categories: SEO, content, tips

This is how the publications on each of the pages of labels and content would look.

Table Labels / Content

We can see what the following pages have the same post:

• SEO Tags and Duplicate Content or questionable content.
• Categories SEO and Content.

Solution

The solution depends on how you use the categories and the labels and how many there are in each publication.

If you use few categories and many tags (like most people) add a meta-tags index, follow to your tag page.

In this case, your groups are the ones that will rank in the search results.

If you use a lot of categories and a few tags, this would be reversed by adding the index, follow meta-tags to your category pages.

Use of meta tags to dam access to your site

Mobile version

This is happening more and more due to the massive increase in mobile traffic in the last year.

What happens here is that two URLs for the page are presented on every page of a website.

• www.ejemplo.com/pagina.html
• my.example.com/page.html

Solution

There are a few possible solutions, and the first is to make the mobile website different from the normal one, with all

the pages with different URLs and different designs that present the information according to the device with which the web is accessed.

The latter requires a lot of time and effort, the recommended thing in the case of not having time is to

create a responsive design that dynamically adapts the web design based on the resolution of the visitor’s screen.

Finally, the fastest solution is to add rel = canonical tags to all pages from the mobile web to the regular website.

Parameters in the URL

There are many types of settings, especially in e-commerce: product filters (color, size, score, etc.), ordering (the lowest price, relevance, the highest price, grid, etc.) and user sessions.

The problem is that many of these parameters do not change the content of the page, which causes there are many URLs for the same material.

In this example, we can see three parameters: color, low price, and high price.

Example of parameters in Google, Webmasters Tools

Solution.

The solution for any problem with the parameters is to add a rel = canonical tag to the original page, and simply with this,

you can avoid any confusion by Google with the original page.

Another possible solution is to indicate to Google through Google Webmaster Tools > Configuration > URL

parameters which parameters should be ignored when indexing pages on your website.

Pagination

Pagination refers to when an article, product list, or tag and category pages have more than one page.

Although the pages have different content, they all are focused on the same topic.

This is a significant problem on e-commerce pages, where they have hundreds of articles in the same category.

Solution

Currently, there are rel = next and rel = prev tags that allow search engines to know that all pages belong to the same

category/publication, not indexing all pages and focusing all the positioning potential on the first page.

How to use NEXT and PREV parameters?

Another solution is to find the paging parameter in the URL and enter it in Google Webmaster Tools so that it is not indexed.

In addition to these, there are many causes of unintended duplicate content, but these are perhaps the most common and those with a more or less simple solution.

Duplicate content or questionable content is something to be always on the lookout for, as having a few duplicate pages is an easy solution.

Still, when this number becomes enormous, it can be a very tedious task.