Google robots already allocate a limited amount of time to crawling each website. To make matters worse, duplicate content causes robots to waste part of that time searching and, therefore, allocate less and less time to us.
It sounds problematic when put like that, and it is perhaps one of the main reasons why we experience indexing failures.
By having two or more versions of the same thing, we are also causing authority signals, such as backlinks and social media shares, to divide their efforts, making each version weaker, and generally limiting our performance.
How to know if you have duplicate content on your website?
Duplication can occur in many ways, for example: if we have two domains or subdomains; mobile versions using the same meta tags as titles, descriptions, etc.; as well as, different URLs for the same page but with different parameters such as “/example” and /example/”.
However, not everything is bad, and even if we have duplicate content at first glance, there are some techniques to tell Google that the same content, for example in Spanish, is for users from different countries or that one of the versions of our website is not the main one.
Errors and techniques to solve duplicate content
Having said all of the above and put into perspective, let’s get down to business with different considerations regarding duplicate content in SEO.
I have collected some common mistakes, always seen from my experience, so if you see something that does not fit, I would appreciate a comment to help improve and complete this article.
1. Do not use the Hreflang tag for International SEO
This is one of the first things I learned.
Imagine that you are new and suddenly belgium email list you have to go out of your way to tell Google not to count the same content on a website as duplicates.
In these cases the hreflang tag is vital.
For example, in my case, an eCommerce with the same content but in which only the price of the products changes…
How do I tell Google that it is not a duplicate but is aimed at another audience?
The solution is this tag that tells Google which version to display in which country.
Hreflang is very useful in two cases: on the expanding the brand’s global appeal one hand, when we have a web page with the same content but translated literally, and on the other, when we have the same content and in the same language.
In the latter case, the language and maldivian lads country must be specified.
This way, we solve a possible separate URLs penalty for duplicate content, showing the correct page to the ideal person.
One important thing to note is that for this to make sense, it must be used on both duplicate pages.
In addition, Google recommends using it with the “canonical” which we will see in the next section.