“The content is plagiarised”
This is the most displeasing popup one will hardly want to see on its system screen when dealing with some sort of content management. This is the statement that defines that your content is lacking uniqueness or individuality that makes your business stand out among all your competitors. You won’t desire to have it. Will you?
But, what does it mean by plagiarism? How to deal with these plagiarism things? And what exactly is it? How is it going to make a difference to a business? Is it a penalizing issue? Or not?
One with no knowledge on the concept of plagiarism or duplicate content or content duplicity can have loads of such up-mentioned doubts or questions, which are usual.
Going point over point:
Briefing Content duplicity or duplicate content:
You write a content on a specific topic and post it wherever you are supposed to, then you see there is already a similar content posted before on some other sites, then there is a high probability that your content is duplicate. You wrote it completely on your own, but because of some similarities between your newly uploaded content and previously existing ones of some other sites, you get the popup that “Your content is plagiarized”. Awful! But it happens. Though duplicate content cannot be an activity done intentionally, but this is the issue that needs to be resolved as soon as possible.
Also, if you post the same content on various pages of the same or other websites of your business, that will be also considered as duplicate content. Going with the plagiarism rules of Google, it is really tough to strain out zero plagiarised content, as we are bound to put down some identical content which are fixed like the location, product name, quantity, etc. which are included in the statistics, but need to represent in a bit creative-cum-engaging way.
Cutting a long story short, when you see similar content in more than one website on the SERP on searching something, then there has been a content duplicity or duplicate content activity done. It is not technically penalizing until your content comes under some copyright legal litigations if the other site owner files a complaint.
Why is duplicate content so of a matter?
Targeting a fair and healthy entrepreneurship starts with keeping everything at your end clean and mess-free and keeping your content plagiarism-free or avoiding duplicate content is one among those business-like tricks.
“What is so big deal with duplicate content?”
Imagine, you are peeping into your wardrobe and you are seeing all of your garments white in colour and completely the same in pattern. Which one are you going to pick for your day? Confused and irritated? This is exactly what happens with duplicate contents and this certainly hampers a lot to the business by confusing the Search Engine Optimization.
It’s a pointless challenge to SEO:
SEO being the most important technical part of website ranking gets confused while ranking the websites on the SERP and there are top chances that your content will get diluted when SEO starts indexing the websites. As in this process, whichever is with raw and real first copy of the content will be indexed at the top and rest will go down, and this terribly affects a website with duplicate content. Eventually, your website will not get expected visibility on the SERP, which lowers your website rank and metrics.
It is an ungettable risk:
When we take a lot of risks to upmarket our website or business, a simple mistake can lower the business within no time. We are supposed to target our viewers or audiences also along with SEO and with this we must focus on creating unique content, so that we get maximum organic leads. Duplicate content is not a smart strategy rather it creates an adverse impression on the users, so better to come up with more engaging and lead-inviting content instead of plagiarized content, understanding the users and content management rules.
How does this duplicity happen?
All the digital marketers know the rules of digital marketing and hardly a genuine marketer will take this risk of duplicate content knowingly. But, in some ways like following ones, contents are being plagiarised or copied or duplicated:
- One business, more than one website and same content. Beep! It’s duplicated, as multiple versions of the pages have been indexed while SEO-ing. It happens because of some analytical codes and URL parameters, which occur in several versions of the same website, for different users.
- If the content is the same in two websites with different extensions say http:// and https://, and both are live on the SERP then it will show two different versions of the same website and will confirm that the content is duplicate.
- Most common is the copied content, where your already-posted article or blog is being posted by some other website, which is a clear example of duplicate content. And it is tough to get zero duplicate content in eCommerce businesses, as there you will find much similarities between content of different websites as they may be marketing the same product and they all have to go with the manufacturer’s description.
Quick-fix to duplicate content issues:
Loads of options are there to quick-fix a duplicate content issue, where you can stop your content being copied by other sites and also you can check if your content is becoming the duplicate of any other ones, as you waste a lot of time making the content on your own and at the end you get a plagiarized alert. Terrible!
- Meta tagging: When you do not want to get some of your pages being indexed by Google, where there are chances of existing duplicate content, then add a ‘no index’ meta robot tag to the HTML code of that particular page. With this meta robots tagging, Google will get to know which pages to index and which not to.
- Canonical tagging: With this, we highlight the main page where we are sure that there is no sort of duplicate content. With rel=canonical piece of HTML code, we say Google that on a particular page we have our own content and direct Google to showcase that page as the main page. The canonical tag separates the two versions of the site and uplift the master version, keeping the other with duplicate content eliminated. Canonical tags make your content distinctive and singly.
- URL duplication: Minute changes in the URLs will create duplicate content as the website with http:// is not the same as the website with https://. Similarly, www-prefixed websites and non-www-prefixed websites show two different results on the SERP, and these all create a confusion and lack of clarity to SEO and Google. It becomes difficult to decide which versions of a website to index and which not to.
- Redirects: Faulty use of redirects can drag your site rank down and effective use can bring you more leads, just you got to know the golden trick to use the redirect appropriately. When you redirect your users to the engaging page, you get an overall ranking benefit on the entire site (301 redirect is the most used one)
- Taxonomy: Plan a strategic content creation with unique H1, top-searched keywords and try maintaining an organized and authentic content flow by crawling all the pages thoroughly.
- Parameter handling: Like meta tagging, with parameter handling we send a signal to Google on which pages to be crawled and which to not. Working together with Google Search Console and Webmaster tools, parameter handling miraculously works at deprioritizing the pages with duplicate content.
Stay alert to unknown activities on your site:
A thorough and frequent indexing of your website with the help of Search Console is needed to check if there is any unauthorised activity done on your website. To keep your content being copied by other sites, must use canonical tags on every content you upload. You can legally act against the sites who copy your content, claiming for a removal or accreditation of the content.
Golden tips at the end:
Duplicate content is more of a big deal when you are targeting a high reach in your business. But, when you create unique, creative, engaging content relevant to the objective of your business and the type of audience you are dealing with, it becomes tough to stumble upon such duplicate content issues.
That is true, you cannot control others to copy you, but you can be smarter to secure authorization of your content using above-mentioned tips. Stay adhered to all the rules of content marketing and do not forget to inculcate technical tweaks to outshine your business with more engagement and website ranking.
