Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet word by word on more than one different URL. The duplicate content is also termed when the same site contains multiple pages with largely identical content.
Besides the word ‘duplication’ is also sometimes used when the search engines get confused between pages with same description when displaying search results.
Different popular search engines always discouraged the duplicate content because they want to give internet users unique results which will become food for their thoughts while eliminating same content available on different websites from their result pages.
Types of Duplicate Content
The issue of duplicate content is circulating among many internet users from quite some time which has created disturbance among many online peers. So it is a real dire need to settle down the dust of disturbance.
Basically there are many shortcomings of a duplicate content but here we will first dissect the types of duplicate content and then discuss the shortcomings of it.
One type is deceptive or malicious duplicate content and the other kind is non-deceptive or non-malicious duplicate content.
Shortcomings of Deceptive Duplicate Content
Deceptive duplicate content is categorized when the content is intentionally duplicated on various websites to manipulate the ranking categorized by search engines or to improve the page ranking of a particular site.
The shortcomings of this type of duplicate content and deceptive technique will ultimately cause the page ranking of the site to suffer or in severe cases the site might be entirely removed from the index of search engine.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc absolutely discourage and hate the duplicated content. These search engines, mainly Google is totally aware of this technique and have implemented back end crawling tactics to dig out the sites involved in duplication of content.
Shortcomings of Non-Deceptive Duplicate Content
Non-deceptive duplicate content is considered by search engines when the same content is placed more then once in same site under various URLs.
For instance if any one of you have clothing business and the product red trouser is your newly added product or it’s the main item on your website then for sure you will place the same content about red trouser on your different pages. Google will instantly consider it as a duplicate content.
Even if you write copyright policy of 300 words at the end of every page then again it will be considered as a duplicate content because Google will see it as keywords stuffing on every single page. There are also some shortcomings of this type of duplicate content. When Google finds same content on same site it only choose one page of that site and discard the rest.
How to avoid Duplicate Content and its Shortcomings
Now as a matter of fact now there are many ways to avoid non-deceptive duplication of content to outrun from its shortcomings. You can block content of some pages of your website with ‘noindex’ meta tag or adding ‘robots.txt’ meta tag in the head section to stop the spiders of search engine to index that page.
But the best way to become Google friendly website is to use canonicalization. Canonicalization is used when there is more then one identical content on your website and you want to stop Google to consider it duplicate content then you pick a canonical URL (preferred URL) to consider for indexing.
On and off you should also check the content of your website for any replication. If you found yourself a victim and your content is theft and duplicated then you can report the matter to Google under their DMCA guidelines.
Besides this, there are also some disadvantages of Google’s policy of removing duplicated content which is hampering the page rank of many sites. But this topic is a subject of totally another topic which will be discussed afterwards.