Duplicate content or identical content can lead to decline in search rankings.
When two or more pages on a website contain substantially the same content, it can cause problems with search engine crawlers and indexing.
This can lead to lower rankings and visibility for those pages, as well as potential penalties from Google.
There are a number of ways to avoid duplicate content penalties, and understanding the causes of duplicate content is essential for avoiding them.
- One of the most common causes of duplicate content is inadvertently publishing the same article on multiple pages of a website.
- Another common cause of duplicate content is using multiple URLs to refer to the same page. This can happen when a website changes its domain name or uses multiple domain names, or when pages are moved without properly redirecting the old URLs to the new ones.
- There are a number of other causes of duplicate content, such as printer-friendly versions of pages, session IDs in URLs, and pagination.
Canonical URLs are used to identify the original version of a piece of content.
When you use canonical tags on your pages, you tell search engines which version is the original and which should be indexed and ranked.