4 Tips on How to Deal with Duplicate Content Issues

How-to-deal-with-duplicate-content

If you work as a content writer for SEO service, you certainly have to face or deal with duplicate content issues. There are many definition of duplicate content that you can discover. But, among so many definitions, some people still love referring to Google’s definition. According to Google, duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.

Broadly, Google categories two types of instances of duplicate content. The first type is for duplicate content on the same domain. The other type is for duplicate content across multiple domains.  This way, you can review whether you have that kind of duplicate content on your site.

Problems caused by Duplicate Content

After reviewing the existence of duplicate content on you site, now, you have to know the problems that can be caused by having duplicate content.

  1. Link Popularity Dilution

You will end up creating and distributing different versions of your site links as you start link-building. This is because search engines could not interpret that all the URLs pointed to the same target location as you don’t set a consistent URL structure for your site.

  1. Showing unfriendly URLs

When Google discovers two identical or appreciably similar resources on the web, it chooses to show one of them to the searcher. Mostly, Google will select the best one to be displayed on search engine result lists. But, sometimes Google might show a poor looking URL version of your site.

There wouldn’t have been this confusion and the user would only see the best and most branded version of your URL, if you avoided the instance of duplicate content in the first place.

  1. Zapping Search Engine Crawler Resources

Since Google will surely crawl your site, so it is important to understand how search bots will crawl over your new content. These crawler cycles could have otherwise been used to crawl over and index any freshly published content that you might have added to your site. This not only will waste crawler resources but also will hurt your SEO.

Solutions for Treating the Duplicate Content Problem

  1. Consistency

In the earlier section, you can see that a majority of instances of duplicate content occurs when the URL structure is inconsistent. Therefore, it will be better to standardize your preferred link structure along with proper use of canonical tags. To let Google knows your preferred URL version, you can set your preference in your Google Webmasters account. Here some things that you could opt to set your preferred domain:

  • Sorts duplicate content issues with the www and non-www version
  • Retains link juice

Next step after setting your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools is to set up 301 redirects from all of the non-preferred domain links on your site to your preferred ones. This step will make visitors learn about your preferred version.

  1. Canonicalization

Canonical tags can be implemented through several ways, such as follows:

  • Set the preferred version: www and the non-www
  • Manually point to the canonical link for all the pages
  • Set up 301 redirects
  1. Use the hreflang tag to handle localized sites

Hreflang tag is important to help the search engines choose the right version of your content, especially after you use translated content. For example, you translate your English site into Spanish to meet the local audience language, you should add the tag, “<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-es” />” to the Spanish version of your site.

Following this method will avoid you from the risk of search engines considering it as duplicate content and in the other side, it will also improve the user experience when they want to be served in their native language.

  1. Use the hashtag instead of the question mark operator when using UTM parameters

To measure the effectiveness of different Channels, it’s common to use tracking URL parameters like the source, campaign and medium. But, when you create a link like http://yoursite.com/?utm_source=newsletter4&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=holidays, search engines crawl it and report instances of duplicate content.

Hence, an easy way is to use the # operator rather than the question mark. In order to avoiding duplicate content issues, search engine bots come across the # sign in a URL, they ignore all that follows the sign.

How SSL Affect Your SEO

How SSL affected your SEO

Since security is a top priority for Google, the attempt in making Google more secure is quite real; this can be seen that recently, our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. This enable people that using Search, Gmail, and Google Drive to have a more secure connection to Google.

Besides, SSL is provided to make the internet safer more broadly which is aimed to ensure that websites which people access from Google are secure. For instance, SSL will have created resources that help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

Nowadays, we can see that many web developers adopting HTTPS which is also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security on their website which make this new phenomenon becomes more interesting.

Due to this, a research has been conducted to prove whether sites use secure encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms which in the end it firmly produced positive results. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal-affecting less than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content-while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

1. SEO advantages when you switch to HTTPS

It is clear that the main function of HTTPS is to offer security, so this will surely elevate your Google’s grades. However, there are also some additional SEO benefits for you to consider, such as belows:

2. Increased rankings

The obvious one as stated, Google has confirmed the slight ranking boost of HTTPS sites. Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own, but this is still something to keep in mind. On the plus side, the value of switching to HTTPS is very likely to increase over time.

3. Referrer Data

When traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This is unlike what happens when traffic passes through an HTTP site, and it is stripped away and looks as though it is “direct.”

4. Security and Privacy

HTTPS adds security for your SEO goals and website in several ways:

  • It verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to.
  • It prevents tampering by third parties.
  • It makes your site more secure for visitors.
  • It encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

4 Ways on How to Safely Earn Four Backlinks

How to Safely Earn Four Backlinks This Weekend

Many experts agree that “domain-level link features” and “page-level link features” are the most influential factors in a site’s ranking. But, SEO services still should consider the inherent dangers of backlinks so keep it clear and helpful as possible is the best way to earn more backlinks. Here are other four simple ways to jumpstart your site, boost your rankings, grow your authority, and make more traffic to your site.

  1. Discover an Influencer and Ask for a Link Reference

Getting a link reference from many influencers marketing is a method that many rely on for link creation. This is a safe method; however, since it relies on personal relationship with the influencer, this can be difficult if you lack a platform.

Somebody can be labeled as an influencer if he or she is famous within your niche. This people can give you lots of suggestion and methodologies, but one of the most powerful methods is link creation where this concept aims to reach out to an influencer and ask for a link to your blog. You can also mention the influencer in your article or link to her content to make the tactic works more effectively.

So, the more amounts of influencers that you can get, the more people you can ask and the better chance of success you will get.

  1. Write One Guest Blog for One Publication

Another tricky way to boost your traffic is through writing a post into a website where you can put your link in the post. This technique is known as guest posting. It seems intimidating to some people as it requires you to do extra work, besides more people will see your article and for some writers it can be a bit scary when you discover that it is so powerful, but this can bring you with lots of benefits. In fact, you can post your own company blog or personal blog there, both is fine.

So, be sure that you always submit your content based on its quality, since not many publications are worthy.

  1. Create a Single Info graphic

Even though, infographic may not as popular as before, but still it is one of the valuable ways to secure your links. Therefore, you still can rely to an infographic online and virtually guarantee hundreds of backlinks. Infographics are actually a type of visual content as such, they are appealing to users, and will retain link value for a long time.

Moreover, creating a powerful infographic is quite simple because all you need is only a designer and an idea. You can even finish the entire process in a day, yet you can use it as a valuable piece of content.

  1. Fix at Least One Broken Link

Avoid having any broken link as possible as you can, a broken link is a page on your site that has moved or been deleted. So, to get it back you should fix the link. There are several ways to fix it:

  • You can use a tool like Domain Hunter Plus or Broken Link Checker to find any broken links on your site.
  • Don’t try to fix the backlinks coming from spam or off-niche sites since you still want the backlink.
  • Prepare for a replacement link that is relevant.
  • Or you can also ask them to fix the link by sending an email to the webmaster of the site.