Strategies for Avoiding Duplicate Content in Your Writing

You can specify the canonical URL with this tag to help google search decide which of the possible many URLs to index for this page.Note that this tag is often used incorrectly by website owners, so google search can’t rely on it and treats it as a hint but might choose URL anyway. More on that later.

In this article, we will address duplicate content. I will give you three tips to avoid or remove it. Many of you have probably seen or heard about duplicate content. Some people think it influences the perceived quality of site, but it doesn’t. It does cause some challenges for website owners, though because it’s harder to performance of pages with duplicates. It might make similar content compete with each other. And it can cause page to take longer to get crawled if this happens at a large scale.

So it’s not great and it something you might want to clean up. But it isn’t something that you should lose sleep over.

In google search Console, you might come across this reasons why a page isn’t indexed–duplicated without user-selected canonical, alternate page with proper canonical tag, or duplicate Google choose different canonical than user. Are these problems? No not really. They are a reasons why page wasn’t indexed. But if it’s a duplicate it normally means we found the same or very similar content with different URL and indexed that instead. So the content is in Google search, just not under the URL mentioned in the report. Sometimes this also happens in connection with international sites where multiple language versions are very similar to each other. It’s fine, then.

Now let’s see what we can do to avoid this.

Let’s start with duplicate without user selected-canonical. This basically means that Googlebot found the same content with different URLs. And this is URL that Google didn’t choose for indexing.

Google search made a decision in the case because there is not single in the HTML. That single is called a canonical tag.

You can specify the canonical URL with this tag to help Google Search decide which of the possible many URLs to index to this page. Note that this tag is often used incorrectly by website owners, So Google search can’t rely on it and treats it as a hint but might choose a different URL anyway. More on that later. All right, to fix this and get another URL indexed, You can specify the canonical URL in the HTML tag or an HTTP header, as we’ve seen in the preview article.Tip Number two now addresses the duplicate Google choose different canonical than user reason for not indexing a page. You might see this in the Google search console report as well. IT usually happens if there are link pointing to another URL instead of what the canonical declares.

To fix it, look for internal link pointing at the URL and change them to point to your desired canonical URL instead.
Should these link come from others websites, You can try configuring your server to redirect to the canonical URL instead. If you choose to redirect, consider using a 301 redirect to avoid performance impacts for users as their browsers will remember this redirect and avoid unnecessary network round trips in the future.

My last tip more strategic if you find that you have multiple, very similar pages, even if Google doesn’t consider them duplicate, try to combine them. It make information easier to find for users, will make reporting in Google Search Console easier to work with, and will reduce clutter on your site. So revisit your pages from time to time to see if things can be simplified and combined. All right, we went through three things to do when you want to reduce duplicate content. Basically combine similar pages when possible, set a canonical URL in your code or in the HTTP headers, and consider redirecting from noncanonical URLs to the canonical ones. Pls leave as a comment if you want more technical content on Google search Central and what topics we should cover in the future. see you soon for next Article.