SEO: How To Avoid Duplicate Content

Google's main job is to browse all of the world's websites, and copy them to its data centers (sort of giant hard drives). Thus, when you type a search on Google, the engine does not start looking for websites present on the internet, and able to answer them: it simply looks in its database, stored on its servers, and made up of all the sites in the world, the web pages being able to respond to the research carried out. It's a bit like when you use your computer's search engine: it looks, in the files on your hard drive, for items that may correspond to your search ... except that, in the case of Google, the disk hard in question contains billions of internet sites.

The Problem Of Duplicate Content

When you create a new page on your site, you should be careful not to duplicate content that already exists elsewhere on the web.

Indeed, insofar as Google, in order to function, is obliged to store all the content of most of the world's websites, the costs generated by the phenomenon of duplicate content are very important for the search engine. This results in a policy of degrading the ranking of pages and sites that have copied already existing content.

The Consequences Of Duplicate Content

Concretely, duplicate content can cause two kinds of problems:

Total downgrading of duplicate pages. When Google has the possibility of displaying two pages with the same content, it will choose only one, based on criteria of precedence and notoriety. Basically, the oldest page and / or with the best Page Rank will appear in Google's results, while the other will be completely absent.

Google Panda Sanction. In the event of massive duplicate content, and provided that other criteria suggesting poor editorial quality are detected by Google, a "Panda" type sanction may be applied to the entire domain.

How To React In Case Of Duplicate Content?

If another website has copied your content, you have the option of asking them to remove it by a simple legal means: send a registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt to the owner of the site and its host. The host will have to withdraw the site if you establish the effective copy of these.

E-Merchants, First Concerned By Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is very often found in the context of e-commerce sites. It often happens that e-merchants, to save time, do not write the descriptions of the products sold on the site themselves, preferring to rely on the content offered by the manufacturers of the products. The problem is that most of the time, these descriptions already exist and are therefore previously indexed by Google. The site therefore finds itself in a situation of massive duplicate content , since thousands of product sheets are already published on the manufacturer's site and, very often, on other distributor sites.

The solution to avoid this pitfall is to proceed step by step. When the site is online, it is good to have at least a unique and good quality content for all the categorical pages as well as for the 10 to 20% of products which are the most requested by Internet users. Then, it will be time to rewrite the contents of the other product sheets, spreading the work over several months or even years.