Duplicate content usually refers to substantial blocks of identical content across multiple domains or websites that are appreciably similar in content or format. In most cases, this is generally not deceptive. For example, examples of non-deceptive duplicate content may include: Chat rooms which can create both stripped-down and regular versions targeted at different mobile devices. News Website often hosts several different versions of the same news stories. Online dictionaries that serve as synonyms for the dictionary (e.g., Wikipedia) frequently have both the old and the new (usual version) versions listed.
Duplicate content may have the same purpose and effect as having unrelated pages displayed in search engine results. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) use special algorithms to rate the relevance of web pages in their search results. When duplicate content appears, it may decrease the relevance of that page in the eyes of search engines for particular keywords or search terms. For example, if the search engine visitor searches for “cancer” and “cancer treatments” in the same search engine, a page that displays the medical term “cancer” will significantly decrease in ranking over a page that only displays the keyword “treatment.”
There are two ways in which duplicate content can be created on a website. URL rewriting orcode can be used to create two versions of a web page, where the first URL is identical to the second, but the second URL is substituted with a different domain name. This method is commonly referred to as URL rewriting orcode. Another way in which duplicate content can be introduced into a website is to add two URLs, one in the index page and one in each individual page. This is referred to as Directory Redirecting, and Google uses two versions of the same URL when redirecting a user to another website.
The introduction of duplicate content into websites can also cause search engine rankings to be affected. When a website contains duplicate content, it causes the search engine results pages to contain the duplicate text. The search engine’s algorithm attempts to eliminate these duplicate texts and replace them with “non-duplicate” texts that are closer synonyms of the target words or more likely to be understood by users. An example of non-duplicate text would be “the restaurant at” instead of “the restaurant located at.”
Duplicate content can also cause problems for links from web pages containing duplicate content to fail. When web pages containing duplicate content fail to properly link to each other, users will notice that they cannot obtain the same information from the linked websites. For example, a website containing a link to the Google homepage might fail to connect to Google homepage when visiting via a search engine. Users will not realize that Google website is a copy of the original source website and click on the link to obtain the information desired from the original source. In addition, Google does not indicate in the SERPs that the requested page is available from an alternate source.
To combat duplicate content issues and ensure that all web pages linking to a single website have a good connection, site owners may wish to use parameter handling code on their websites. A parameter refers to a specific HTML element used to control the path to a target URL. Each time the web page containing the duplicate content changes, the desired target URL is refreshed in the SERPs.
To prevent duplicate content issues and ensure that all web pages linking to a single website have a good connection, site owners should consider using a parameter handling code on all duplicate content pages. A parameter is an HTML element used to control the path to a target URL. When a new copy of the website is created, the scraper URL that contains the desired target text is updated in the SERPs.
Duplicate content and search engines play well into each other as many search engines are continuously on the lookout for websites containing duplicate texts. However, it can be a challenge for search engines to continually keep up with how often websites with identical content are created. Duplicate texts have a negative effect on the ranking of a website but do not necessarily cause it to drop off the rankings. For some time, it is believed that all duplicate texts on a website will drop off the rankings; however, recent changes by Google have shown that they are not to be so keen.