OnCrawl guide - SEO basics

DUPLICATE CONTENT

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Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place on a website:

- It can be inside but also outside of your website.

- It causes troubles to crawlers since it is impossible to tell which piece is more relevant than the other for a given query.

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It leads to an important loss of relevant results on search engine results. Duplicate content can lead to three main issues:

- confusion between versions to index

- trouble to direct the link metrics (authority, trust, anchor text, link juice) to the right page or share it between different versions

- inability to rank the right version for queries

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With OnCrawl, you can easily spot your cluster of duplicate pages and near duplicates.

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When clicking on a specific c l u s t e r , y o u w i l l a c c e s s further details about the URLs concerned.

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I f you cl ick on a specific canonical URL you can see pages that have similar content.

You can check if you have duplicated HTML.

Here, you can see that 1,606 pages have a duplicate title. When clicking on it, you will access the details

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A content which is found in different URLs should be canonicalized. It can be done by using:

- 301 redirects

- Rel=canonical

- Parameter handling tools in Google Webmaster Central

- NoIndex, NoFollow

BEST PRACTICES TODUPLICATE CONTENT

Further methods can be implemented :

- Preferred domain: It tells search engines whether a site should be displayed with the www or not in the search engine result pages.

- Internal linking If you decide that the canonical version of a website is www.mywebsite.com/, then all the internal links should go to http://www.mywebsite.com/website.html

BEST PRACTICES TODUPLICATE CONTENT

- Merging content When regrouping content, be sure to add a link back to the original one. - Write unique product descriptions If you write your own descriptions instead of taking the manufacturer ones, it might help you to rank above those sites.

BEST PRACTICES TODUPLICATE CONTENT

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?This is what you should avoid: - URL issues Parameters like click tracking or analytics code can lead to duplicate content issues. Similar URLs pointing to identical pages will have problems. Google regards www, non-www, .com, com/index.html, http or https as different pages even if they are the same. It is seen as duplicate content.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?Printer-friendly

Printer-friendly versions of content can cause duplicate content issues when multiple versions of the pages get indexed. Example:www.mywebsite.com/red-item www.mywebsite.com/print/red-item

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?Session IDs

This common issue happens when each user that comes on a website is assigned a different session ID that is stored in the URL. Example:www.mywebsite.com/red-item?SESSID=142www.mywebsite.com/red-item

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?- Copied or syndicated information If you want to share an article, a quote or a comment of someone you worship or just to illustrate your articles, it will be seen as duplicate content, even if you have linked back to its website or URL.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?- Duplicate product information It occurs when you use manufacturers’ item descriptions hosted on their websites to describe your products. However, the description might appear on many different websites. This is just pure duplicate content.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT AND AVOID

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES?? ?- Sorting and multi-pages lists If you range 30 items by price or by alphabetical order, you will end up with two pages with the same content but with different URLs.

For any questions about duplicate content, feel free to drop us a line

@Oncrawl_CS

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