Having unique content on a website is very important for search engine positioning. Duplicating content from other sites, or having duplicate text on your site, will have negative effects on your site’s visibility. In this article, I’ve compiled a handful of information on duplicate content-how to check if it appears on a page, how it affects SEO, and how to avoid duplicate content on a page.

The dangers of duplicate content

There are many risks associated with having duplicate content on a website. The first is a drop in the page’s position in Google search results. Search engines such as Google consider duplicate content inappropriate, as they look for valuable and unique content on the Internet to satisfy users’ needs.

Another threat is a duplicate content penalty – text that is not unique can trigger a Google response, i.e. a duplicate content penalty. This involves a drop in the position of a website in search results, which in turn translates into fewer visits to the site, a drop in the conversion rate, and less profitable SEO.

Duplicate content – how to check for duplicates on your site?

There are various tools to check for duplicate text on a website. One of the best tools is Copyscape . It allows you to check whether the content on our site is copied from other sources. Just paste the URL of the website you want to check, and the tool will check itself for similar content on other sites.

Another tool worth using is Google Search Console . This tool allows you to monitor your site’s position in Google search results, as well as detect duplicate content issues.

How to avoid problems with duplicate content?

There are many ways to avoid the problem of duplicate content on a website. The first and most important is simply to have unique and valuable content on the website. Writing your own articles, product descriptions or website content is key to avoiding duplicate content problems. With the increasing popularity of AI text generators , creating unique content is getting faster and requires less effort, so copying content from a manufacturer’s website, for example, is an even bigger mistake.

Another way is to use canonical tags on the website:

With such tags, you can indicate to Google which subpage is the most important from an SEO perspective. The easiest way to explain this is to use the example of an online store where you want to increase the visibility of a specific category. If you use pagination:

It’s a good idea to put the canonical tag on the first subpage with products or subpage where all products are listed without pagination.

Another way to avoid duplicate content problems is to use internal links on a website. They allow us to point to another unique article that is thematically related to our article. The use of internal links allows you to increase the value of your website, and positively affects its position in Google search results. So instead of repeating the same information, it is better to use an internal link.

It is also worth ensuring that our website is properly built and optimized for SEO. Using appropriate tags, meta descriptions or optimizing images are just some of the elements that affect a website’s positioning in search results. All these elements should also be unique for each URL.

Having unique content on a website is crucial to achieving SEO success on Google. Duplicate content on a website can lead to a drop in page rank, as well as a penalty from Google. However, there are ways to avoid duplicate content problems.

Don’t have time to do your own SEO optimization and create unique content? Contact me – me and my team will take care of it for you!