Duplicate content is a problem for search engines and users alike. When the same content appears on multiple pages, it can confuse search engine bots and users who need to know which one is the original.
Use a Tool
Duplicate content on your website can greatly impact your search engine rankings. Google estimates that over 30% of websites have duplicate content issues.
In most cases, this is not intentional. However, it can still be a big problem, as it confuses Google’s crawlers and can cause significant SEO harm.
One of the easiest ways to find duplicate content on your website is to use a tool. A free website duplicate content checker will help you find out what pages have duplicate content and a lot of other information about your websites, such as loading time, number of words per page, and much more.
For the most part, these tools are free to use. However, paying for a service for a duplicate content-checking tool may be better if you need to check multiple websites. It’s a powerful tool that will quickly and efficiently check any published articles for duplicate content, giving you the locations where you can review your content to make sure it’s unique and original.
Do a Manual Search
If your website has duplicate content, it can hurt your SEO performance. Duplicate content is exact or near-exact content that appears on different pages of your website.
There are a few ways to identify duplicate content on your website. You can do a manual search using a tool. Various reasons, including unintentional mistakes or bad content production, can cause duplicate content. It’s a red flag to Google, and it can lower your domain authority and keyword rankings.
Check Your Robots.txt File
If your website has duplicate content, it can affect how it performs in search results. This is a common issue for e-commerce sites selling products of different sizes or colors.
One of the easiest ways to fix this problem is to add a 301 redirect from your duplicate content page to its original page. This will stop Google from crawling the duplicate content and will only index the original page.
Using the Robots Exclusion Protocol, you can block search engine bots from accessing certain files or folders on your website. This can help keep unwanted pages off your site and reduce the time it takes to crawl your entire site.
Several commands can be used to make this happen. The most commonly used are the Disallow and Allow commands. Both of these commands can be added to your robots.txt file. The “Disallow” command blocks bots from accessing a particular file or folder, while the “Allow” command allows them to do so.
Take Screenshots
If you suspect your website has duplicate content, the first step is to take screenshots of both your site and the copied page. This will show you evidence to show Google and other search engines if you decide to take legal action against the site scooptimes owner.
The next step is to review these screenshots to see what type of duplicate content you have and whether any technical issues need to be addressed. This may include pages that don’t load correctly on mobile devices or AMP-optimized versions of the same page.
Depending on what you find, it could be a sign of an information architecture or management problem that needs to be addressed. Or it might be a sign of a site-wide issue that can be easily solved by updating some of the more outdated pages on your website. Using the screenshots and the tools mentioned in this guide, you can work on fixing these problems and moving your site forward.