5 SEO Audit Tools to Detect Duplicate Content and Options to Fix it

Duplicate Content: SEO Audit tools and Solutions

Duplicate content can affect the ranking of the original page. Fortunately, there are effective ways to find and fix duplicate content.

"Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains, that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar", according to Google. Identifying duplicate content issues is crucial as if duplicate content appears either accidently or deliberately on your website, Google will choose to consolidate and show only one version if it feels that content is deliberately duplicated across domains in order to try and manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic. This can affect your website’s ranking and traffic. Working with an experienced SEO company in New York can help businesses address this concern. SEO professionals use specific audit tools to detect duplicate content while auditing, and help businesses replace such content as necessary.

It is always good to double check the content you have created to see whether it is too similar to already published content. Duplicate content can negatively impact your site’s ranking or the site might be removed entirely from Google’s index, which means that it will no longer appears in search results.

Here are some tools that can help identify duplicate content issues:

Screaming Frog: This is a powerful but simple tool used by SEO experts. It creates a comprehensive crawl report of your website and shows all the titles, URLs, word count and status code, to make the review simpler and compare titles and URLs to identify duplicates. In addition to detecting duplicate content, Screaming Frog is used to:

• Check Broken Links.
• Make XML sitemaps and check XML Sitemaps for errors.
• Optimize page titles.
• Identify pages with thin content.
• Find and fix redirects.
• Check server response time.

Copyscape: This is one of the oldest plagiarism tools that compares your content against already published content across the web in a matter of seconds. You have to simply enter the URL of your content and the tool will let you know what percentage of your content matches already published content.

Siteliner: This tool systematically checks your entire site internally for duplicate content,

• Highlights the duplicate content on each page by intelligently excluding common content such as menus and navigations.
• Checks all internal links and make sure they are working.
• Highlights broken links, if any, so that you can easily fix them.
• Crawls and analyzes the pages on your site, and reveals key information about each page.
• Provides a standard XML sitemap for your site.
• Identifies the most prominent pages of search engines as they crawl through your site based on the link patterns between your pages.

Plagspotter: This duplicate content detection tool thoroughly and quickly checks the URL and provide the sources of duplicate content for further review. Other features in the affordable paid version include

• Full site scan.
• Plagiarism monitoring.
• Batch searches.

Duplichecker: This tool allows you to quickly conduct useful text and URL searches. Once you are registered, you can do unlimited searches, though the time taken for the search would vary according to the length of the text and size of the file.

Technical options to fix duplicate content:

301 redirect: In most of the cases, implementing a 301 redirect is the best way to combat duplicate content and give precedence to the original content page. When a 301 redirect is used, multiple pages with the potential to rank well are combined into a single page. This will have a positive impact on the original page and help it rank well.

Canonical URL: Another option to fix the duplicate content issue is to use a canonical URL. Here, you can explicitly tell Google which URL is canonical. Otherwise, if there are multiple URLs for a single page or different pages with single content, Google will choose one URL as canonical and crawl that, and consider other URLs as duplicates and crawl them less often.

When it is explicitly told which URL is canonical, the search engine can identify the original page that should be indexed and all the duplicate URLs are prevented from being registered. All of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" are credited to the original page.

Noindex, follow meta tag: This tag can be included in the HTML head of each page that should be excluded from a search engine’s index. Noindex means that a webpage should not be indexed by search engines and therefore, it will not be shown on SERPs.

The difference between noindex and nofollow and no index and follow are that when you use noindex and nofollow, search engines are asked to not index and follow the page. When you use noindex and follow, you are asking search engine not to index the page but to not ignore any links from or to the page.

You can use noindex meta tag to exclude a page with duplicate content from being indexed by the search engine. For that, add the following code within your duplicate content page’s head tag.

Using follow along with noindex will make sure that the search engines do not ignore the links on the duplicate pages.

If you create duplicate content accidently or intentionally, it is crucial to detect and fix it. If this is not done, Google might take your website off the first few pages of the search results to give its user the best experience. It will choose the version that is most likely to be the best result and this will reduce the visibility and ranking of duplicate content. Partnering with an expert SEO company in New York can help you fix duplicate content issues. Such companies use the best SEO plagiarism tools to detect these issues and fix them. And once this is done, Google will reward you by improving your visibility.

Rajeev Rajagopal is the owner of Managed Outsource Solutions which runs its digital marketing division through MedResponsive since 2003.