Duplicate content is considered harmful to a website’s SEO, because search engines generally view it with disfavor. Duplicate content is any content on your website that appears on another website or page, either on your own website or on another website. If search engines detect duplicate content, they may penalize your website by lowering its ranking in their search results pages.
Search engines strive to provide their users with the most relevant and high-quality content possible, and duplicate content does not fit into this criteria. Duplicate content can confuse search engines, causing them to struggle in determining which version of the content is the original one. As a result, search engines may choose to ignore some or all of the duplicate content on your website, which can negatively affect your website’s SEO ranking.
Another way that duplicate content can harm your website’s SEO ranking is by diluting your website’s authority. When search engines detect duplicate content, they may not know which version is the original, and therefore may not credit your website with the authority and relevance that it deserves. This can lead to lower rankings in search results pages, as search engines may not consider your website to be as trustworthy as other websites with original content.
Duplicate content can also impact your website’s crawl budget, which is the number of pages that search engines are willing to crawl on your website per day. If your website has a lot of duplicate content, search engines may spend more time crawling these pages, leaving Duplicate content fewer resources to crawl original content. This can cause valuable original content to be ignored by search engines, leading to lower rankings and less traffic to your website.
So, what can you do to avoid these negative consequences of duplicate content? The easiest and most effective solution is to create original content that is unique to your website. This could involve creating new content that is not available anywhere else or updating existing content to make it more unique.
Another solution is to use canonicalization to indicate to search engines which version of duplicate content is the original. Canonicalization is the process of telling search engines which version of a web page should be considered the primary or canonical version. This can be achieved by adding the rel=”canonical” tag to the HTML of the primary page, which will tell search engines to prioritize the primary version of the content and ignore any duplicate versions.
In conclusion, duplicate content can harm your website’s SEO ranking in multiple ways, from confusing search engines to diluting your website’s authority and decreasing your crawl budget. To avoid these negative consequences, it’s important to create original and unique content for your website or use canonicalization to indicate the primary version of duplicate content. By doing so, you can improve your website’s SEO ranking and attract more traffic to your website.