After putting a lot of effort into improving your website's content creation and SEO performance, trying to get good performance with regular monitoring of your data is probably a strategy that everyone implements. However, another point you should pay attention to here is Google's algorithm systems. With the Panda Algorithm, which started to be implemented in 2011, Google started to prioritize high-quality content and to offer users the most useful content by the algorithm.
With the Panda Algorithm, users started to see content that was primarily considered high quality and original by Google on the SERP, while low quality and duplicate content began to rank much lower in the ranking. Therefore, it is necessary to strive and pay attention not only to present quality content, but also to ensure that your content is not identified as duplicate content by Google Algorithms. Being aware of this situation, many experienced companies in the field of eCommerce pay extra attention to being considered original by Google and not creating duplicate content. In this article, we will talk about what duplicate content is, how it affects your SEO performance, and how to detect and avoid duplicate content.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is when the content on your website is exactly the same or very similar to another content on your page or someone else's website. This is confusing not only for users trying to find content that suits them on the SERP, but also for Google's algorithm. Because the algorithm may not reach a hundred percent correct result in understanding which content is original content. As a result, if your content is original but your website's authority on the SERP is not very high, it may become highly likely that you will rank low in SERP. And of course, after all the effort you put into creating original content and improving your business performance, low visibility of your site is the last thing you want. Because being put first by the algorithm is a huge plus in terms of introducing your business to users better and providing reliability for customers. Therefore, it is necessary to avoid creating duplicate content as much as possible. Before we talk about how to avoid creating duplicate content, let's get to know what is classified as duplicate content.
1) Internal Duplicate
An internal duplicate is when you have two identical or very similar content on your site. As the Google algorithm detects that both of your content are the same, the algorithm cannot be completely sure about which content you are trying to reach users by trying to highlight it on the SERP. In this case, your page cannot get the performance you want on the SERP and the algorithm may present a page that you did not choose to users using different keywords.
2) External Duplicate
External duplicate is the situation where the content on your website is the same or very similar to the content on other websites. Of course, this may be due to the fact that the content of the pages with the original content is copied without permission or rewritten with a certain change (by the way, this is a situation that you should definitely and definitely avoid) or for completely other reasons. For example, you might have a website where you use the same product information as multiple eCommerce pages, because there are many other websites that sell products from a manufacturer other than you. In this case, your page may be called duplicate content by Google, as there will be similar parts to the content of other pages.
What are the negative effects of duplicate content on eCommerce SEO?
1) Drop in SERP Ranking
While there are many different factors to be shown in the first place on the SERP by Google algorithms, one of the most important of them is that your content is as unique as possible. Because these algorithms want to analyze the search intents of the users and bring them exactly the page they want. Therefore, if there are too many sites with the same content, the Google algorithm has to choose between them. This means that if the competitors you compete with have higher authority on the SERP than your website, you will disappear in the rankings and your visibility will decrease. Likewise, if you have internal duplicate content, this can also cause confusion for Google as to which page should be featured. Therefore, one of your pages may stand out while the other may be completely in the background.
2) Your Site Value For Google Drops
Related to the first reason, Google determines the overall value of your site as low. Maybe just a few duplicated content may not make you a completely low-value site, but as the number of them increases, you may be considered by Google as an unoriginal site and not meeting user requests. This can turn into a snowball effect and create unwanted problems for you, as it reduces both your SEO performance and the creditibility of your site.
What are the methods to avoid duplicate content?
Of course, our first recommendation would be to act as soon as possible. Because if you have duplicate content that accumulates over the years and grows with the effect of snowballs and you complain that your SEO performance is not high enough, perhaps this is one of the reasons for this situation. So what can you do to avoid this situation?
1. Be Unique!
Of course, only a few sentences that you use by giving references or that you get from other sites will not directly affect your performance negatively. In fact, citing reliable sources from time to time can even contribute to your site's SEO performance. But of course, apart from these, you need to be as original as possible in every subject. The important point for Google algorithms is to find as many responses as possible to the different search intents of your website, which are expanding and changing every day. So the more original your content is, the more it increases your value to Google.
2) Check the contents of other websites!
Before you start creating your content on a particular topic, it is always useful to check other content written on that topic. Thus, you can be informed about how other pages deal with the topics and you can draw your own route by following different methods. Checking the content of other pages helps you to see different points where you can approach the topics, and you can also respond to different intents of users by adding the parts that other websites miss instead of giving repetitive information on the same topic.
3) Check if your content is duplicated!
Although Google's algorithm is very demanding and requires serious effort to achieve success, it also gives you the opportunity to ensure the security of your content. If you think that your content is used by other websites at the same or very similar rate, notify Google of this situation and let them know that you are the owner of the original content. Thus, regardless of the authority of the other site on the SERP, the original content will be kept in the foreground and you will protect your right.
4) Follow your content closely!
Duplicated content is not a problem that you can simply check once and throw away after taking action. Especially if you are actively creating content, you need to check it regularly and make sure everything is going well. For a steady progress in your SEO performance, you should be in control of everything throughout the process. That's why even the smallest details are important to you.
How to detect duplicate titles on your eCommerce website?
Now you know that even though duplicate content may seem insignificant, it can create serious problems for you in the future. Now it's time to see if you have a duplicate content issue that could grow in the future and cause you extra time and effort. Of course, it is one of your options to detect duplicate content manually by spending a long time in front of the screen. However, it makes more sense for us to use your time efficiently and direct your energy to other parts that are missing. That's why heybooster is here to support you in this matter! Thanks to heybooster, you can automatically check duplicate titles and take action to make the necessary edits.
If there are duplicate titles among your content, heybooster presents them as a report for you and you will be able to complete this task, which may take hours, in a very short time. However, of course, everything does not end with creating a one-time report. In order to achieve success and increase your business performance in every sense, everything must be under your control throughout this process. Therefore, it is critical to be aware of any changes and take swift action. Fortunately, with heybooster, it's easy too! Using Heybooster's duplicate titles insight, you can get reporting anytime and get alerts if anything changes. So, without having to constantly check, heybooster regularly checks everything and alerts you about changes. Thanks to these alerts that you can receive on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, you will prevent this negative situation that may affect your SEO performance, and everything will be completely under your control.
