Today I want to talk about a very important SEO factor and one of the most common mistakes when developing content: duplicate content.
Duplicate content a priori may not be a problem, because you as a webmaster will think “I’m just explaining to the user what my product or service is about”, but the truth is that it negatively affects the positioning of our website. But, before we go into it, let’s explain step by step what duplicate content is.
Table of contents
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content on a website is a factor that negatively affects SEO, either because the content has been partially or completely copied from another website, or because they have copied the content from us.
Although the explanation may seem obvious, it’s important to understand what duplicate content is and why it should be avoided.
One of the most common causes of duplicate content in an ecommerce is when importing products. If we import products from a supplier, it’s likely that in the import we add the product descriptions and categories from their database.
This, although it may seem useful, since we’re adding a description of our product with, probably, good content, negatively affects the positioning of the online store.
What types of duplicate content can we have in our online store?
We can find two types of duplicate content on our website: external and internal duplicate content. Let’s explain each one:
External duplicate content
External duplicate content is content that we find on our website and on other websites. It can be fragments or complete content. This can happen, as I mentioned before, when importing products for example.
It can also be that we’ve liked an article from a blog and we have copied it in its entirety to include it in our blog. Or the other way around: someone copied from you.
Internal duplicate content
Internal duplicate content is when we find identical content in two or more sections of our website.
It can occur, for example, when creating two identical products with different characteristics such as black leather jacket and brown leather jacket. Being the same product, you have most likely decided to use the same product description.
In online stores it can also happen that one or more products appear in several different categories. This is also considered duplicate content.
How do we detect duplicate content on our website?
Knowing what duplicate content is and what types of duplicate content we can find, let’s learn how to detect it.
To detect duplicate content on your website we’ll use tools like Google Search Console or Siteliner. With Google Search Console we can detect duplicate titles and descriptions and where they’re located. Very practical, isn’t it?
With Siteliner we can analyze the content of our website and how much of our content is duplicated within our website.
Detecting duplicate content external to our website is a bit more complicated. We can copy a small piece of content and put it in Google and, if we detect more than one result, unfortunately we have duplicate content.
Consequences of having duplicate content
Let’s get down to the important thing: How does duplicate content affect the positioning of my online store? For Google it’s very important that the content is unique and of quality.
That’s why, some time ago, they released an update to their algorithm called Google Panda, whose functionality is to detect duplicate content and penalize sites that apply this bad practice.
Getting out of a Google penalty is complicated if you don’t know how. You’ll probably need the help of an expert SEO Consultant. Therefore, try to avoid duplicate content by being 100% original.
Solutions for duplicate content in your online store
Create original content
It’s the most logical solution: if we have duplicate content and it can penalize us, we must create original content. Content is one of the pillars of SEO and it must be unique and of high quality.
You can start by customizing your product cards and creating new descriptions. This, in addition to helping your SEO, will personalize your store much more! Surely your customers will appreciate reading a different description than your competitors.
Using a CMS like PrestaShop you can customize the meta title and meta description tags. These tags will show the title and description that your visitors will find when they search on Google.
In addition to reducing duplicate content on your website, by creating personalized and eye-catching titles and descriptions you can influence the amount of clicks received from user that see you in the Google results.
Use canonical urls
This is a term that SEOs like a lot (at least I do). When we talk about canonical url we mean that we have to tell Google “which is our favorite page among many similar ones”, to explain it in some way.
If we have several pages with the same content but different urls, we have to tell Google with the canonical tag which is the one that should be taken into account and ignore the others.
In the case of category paginations, very common, you have to tell Google which is the correct page (specifically, the first of them).
Conclusions
As you’ve seen, duplicate content is a double-edged sword. While it’s true that it’s a “patch” for your website, because you have content quickly and easily, it really is a big problem for the SEO of your online store.
That’s why we must have original content dedicating time and love to each of the product descriptions we write and the articles we write.
If you have detected that you have duplicate content and you need us to give you a hand, you can contact us and we’ll solve the problem. Also, if you want to give a boost to the positioning of your website, visit our SEO section and see what we can do for you.
Have you ever had duplicate content? Tell us your experience and tell us how you solved it in the comments. And, of course, if you liked the article, don’t forget to share it on Social Networks!
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