Guide to Duplicate Content and Syndication
Guide to Duplicate Content and Syndication

By now you should know that fresh, good quality content in websites is a surefire way to get noticed by Google. Google deems it relevant. The search engine optimization Dubai industry also suggests you give importance to a few other on-page content factors like duplicate content and content syndication.

Duplicate Content

A simple definition of duplicate content would be the content of a webpage that appears in multiple places on the internet. For instance, suppose you have an article on great dinner recipes on your webpage. Then someone copies all that text and pastes it as an article on another webpage in his/her own website. This makes both that person’s and your articles duplicate content. 

The example mentioned above is basically theft. 

However, duplicate content is not exactly penalized by Google. Instead, the search engine would just determine which one of the posts should appear in the search results. This means the one not selected would be ignored, and will not influence the ranking of the webpage on which it was posted. Google will likely choose the post on the basis of site authority, going by the theory that a website with high authority will never resort to stealing content from other websites. 

With that said, here are a few tips to manage duplicate content should you experience others scraping off your posts.

  • Do not copy content from another website unless you are permitted to.
  • If you are using anything from another webpage (a reference, a quote etc.) on your article, make sure to link that to its original source. 
  • If you happen to have duplicate content on your page, use a 301 Redirect to make Google index the page you prefer instead of the page with duplicate content.
  • If you have desktop and mobile versions of your website, you may experience duplicate content issues. It’s better to use a mobile responsive website instead of two different websites for desktop and mobile.
  • If you accept posts from guest writers on your website, make sure the articles from them aren’t present anywhere else on the internet. 
  • Finally, make sure Google indexes only your preferred domain. It may consider the ‘www’ and non-www versions of your website as separate websites. This could affect your site visibility.

Content Syndication

It’s basically republishing your content, may it be blogs, videos etc. on third party websites either as articles or snippets. It’s practiced mostly by writers who want a larger audience. Obviously, this gives rise to confusion whether the republished content would be deemed duplicate by Google. 

But thankfully, if it’s done right by the republishing website, no alarms will be raised. As a matter of fact, there are SEO friendly ways on how you can do it. Check the methods below:

  • rel=canonical tag 

This is one of the most effective ways to ensure that there would be no duplicate content issues. All you need to do is to use rel=canonical tag on the articles you are republishing on third party sites. This tag tells Google which one the original article is. It also passes the ranking benefits achieved by the republished article over to the original article.

  • meta noindex tag

This tag works quite similar to the canonical tag. The meta noindex tag essentially requests the search engine to remove the page (of the republished content) from its index.

  • Linking to the original article

The obvious method where you just simply provide text links within the article you are about to republish. 

This should help you avoid duplicate content issues for your website. Make sure to utilize SEO friendly, white hat techniques for your internet marketing endeavors so as to reduce the risk of experiencing ranking difficulties in the future.