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How to avoid Google duplicate content penalties | What is duplicate content | How do I fix duplicate content issues | Google Penalties

Understand how having a website or multiple websites with duplicate content can result in Google penalties. Do not jeopardise your page rank and SEO work by having duplicate content. Find out what causes duplicate content and how to fix them.

HOW TO AVOID BEING PENALISED BY GOOGLE FOR WEBSITES WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT

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TIPS ON HOW TO AVOID BEING PENALISED BY GOOGLE FOR HAVING DUPLICATE CONTENT

The process of designing a website and implementing ethical SEO strategies in order to have your site rank high in the search engines for your target keyword phrases is a time consuming and expensive process. In the present climate and with hundreds of new websites being added to the web each day, all vying for the same competitive keyword phrases, has only proved to make the task all that much harder.

There are many factors that make up the SEO process, including good techniques ( White Hat SEO ) and bad techniques ( Black Hat SEO ). One such area that you should be very careful of is ‘Duplicate Content’.

WHAT IS DUPLICATE CONTENT?

The term ‘Duplicate Content’ refers to websites that contain large blocks of exact or similar content in nature which can be accessed from multiple page URL locations. Although the offending content may well be different, Google may see it as being the same and as such may very well decide to penalise your website.

Your intentions may not be of a malicious or unethical nature, but you never know how Google will respond, so be careful!

WHAT CAUSES DUPLICATE CONTENT??

Listed below re several key factors that can attribute to duplicate content penalties, however on the up side, the issues can be rectified fairly quickly.

Using the same wording across numerous pages of your website
Using the same Title Tags across multiple pages of your website
Text to coding ratio. ie Having more code than actual text content. Some CMS website templates are victims of this situation.
Your site may contain informative text content which has been copied by someone else and inserted into their website, but they haven't linked to you.
You may have created multiple mirror copies of your website and uploaded them to different extensions of your domain. ie www.yoursite.com.au, www.yoursite.com etc

WHAT PENALTIES COULD GOOGLE IMPOSE??

In the unfortunate even that Google has deemed your website as having duplicate content, it may very well have been intentional, however even tho this might be the case, the effects are normally the same.

Penalties that you may experience are as follows:

Google may decide to remove your website from the main index and add it to what is known as a ‘secondary’ index. Websites moved to the ‘secondary’ index usually aren’t included in the main search results.
You may find that Google will index and rank less and less of your website pages.
The scenario that may occur is that over time your page rank will get lower and lower and your website slides down the search results for all your targeted keyword phrases.

WHAT CAN I DO DO IF WEBSITE CONTAINS DUPLICATE CONTENT?

If your site has been as having duplicate content and as a result has been penalised by Google, don’t panic as the situation can be rectified rather easily.

Create individual title tags for every page of your website
Make sure that you create different wording for each page of your website. ie Do not use the same blocks of text on multiple pages
If you insist on having pages with duplicate or similar content I suggest you modify the information on the pages concerned, until the content is at least 20% different
Search engines spiders love text so make sure that your pages consist of at least 300 words. If this isn’t possible, then try combining similar pages to make this possible
The importance of internal links are often overlooked and should be utilised whenever possible. Internal links not only help spiders find new content, but can increase your page rank
Try to avoid copying content directly from other websites
Regularly update your website with unique and informative articles and establish a link building campaign

HOW TO AVOID WEBSITES WITH DUPLICATE CONTENT BEING PENALISED BY GOOGLE

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