Are you planning to redesign your website to get better search engine rankings? One of the most common issues that you may have to handle and find solutions is duplicate content. The commonly occurring issues of duplicity in the content are bound to raise issues and cause fundamental errors in your newly designed website. Given the woes that such content may bring your way, it’s important to plan ahead and avoid the problems of not uploading genuine and original content.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content refers to blocks of text that have already been published on the Internet. These blocks of textual or other material can appear on more than a single domain or website. Google and most other search engines are unhappy with the re-publishing of duplicate content and do not take it too kindly. Because of this, digital marketing agencies and website designers take good care to upload original content only. However, according to Blake Davis from Digitrio, blocking Googlebot is a crucial step when redesigning your company’s website that will make sure your new content isn’t marked as duplicated information. There are some other means and methods of blocking Google bots for this purpose as well.
What are its Causes Behind Duplicate Content?
The causes attributed to the presence of duplicate content are many. The most common reason behind this is the intentional copying of good content from high search-engine ranking websites by other website owners. Its seen that in order to cut costs, and also attain higher rankings, some website owners duplicate content to escalate the visibility of their own websites. With higher search engine rankings come a higher percentage of visitors and prospective customers. This lure plays on the minds of most website developers and owners who commission the publishing of duplicate content to gain more profits.
However, as Google has very stringent stands about originality, it penalizes duplicate content heavily. On the other hand, original content is rewarded by Google. The websites having replicated or similar content is made to slide down in their value by Google. They end up getting lower search engine rankings. Sometimes, they may also be removed from the indices managed by Google in entirety.
Working on the Internet
At certain times, duplicate content results in the unplanned consequence of the way Internet works. With website owners developing the same content for different platforms – desktop and mobile – it is common to find search engines get confused. They fail to understand the similarities and may rate the content as ‘duplicate’. In addition, these search engines also penalize website owners in a big way.
Given the heavy costs of coming into the bad books of search engine giants like Google, it becomes important for site owners to maintain the highest levels of care with respect to differentiating the content for their different platforms. It’s essential for them to use the correct tags in order to keep the content published on different platforms that are distinct from each other. Without the right strategies in place, their efforts of sharing and distributing content can turn out to be futile.
Practical Solutions for Redesigning Websites Without Duplicate Content
One way in which content gets the ‘duplicate’ tag is when site owners commission the redesigning of their websites or when their sites migrate from one address to another. In these instances, the same published content is likely to appear in multiple places. This, in turn, attracts penalties from Google and search engine rankings plummet to reach their lowest ever positions. To avoid this, website owners may want to utilize the 301-redirect command whenever they are redesigning or migrating their website. This is helpful for redirecting users to new websites. The act can be performed within the websites by giving the .htaccess command or via the administrative console.
Yet another simple and effective means of handling duplicate content lies in original content. Authentic and genuine content, which has not been copied or picked from other existing websites, can be used for the purpose of developing new website content. In addition, while linking the website with the content, consistency should be maintained at all times to disallow any notion of duplicate content. With the right website content creation tips and tricks in place, site owners can be assured of getting the much-awaited nod from Google.
Way Forward with Duplicate Content
If you’ve been struggling with the issues of duplicate content then you may want to get in touch with your preferred digital marketing agency to chalk the way forward fitfully. Expert content developers and website redesigners will help you get the website of your dreams in little or no time at all!
