What is duplicate content - causes and solutions

Duplicate content is a common problem that you can hear about in the digital world. If you don’t know what duplicate content is, what its causes are, and how to solve the problem of duplicate content, we would suggest you read this article. In this article, we have answered all your queries related to duplicate content, also known as plagiarism.

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What is duplicate content?

Those of you who are new to the digital world should know that duplicate content is a menace that can ruin your authority in the eyes of the search engine and the target audience. You should know that duplicate content is referred to as the content on multiple URLs indexed on the search engine. If two or more websites have the same content on their pages, the search engine would get confused and demote all of these sites. You must understand that the search engine only tends to rank websites with original and fresh content on their pages.

Duplicate content confuses the search engine as it doesn’t simply know how to rank all pages in the same place. This is why you would see that duplicate content sites are always on the lower search pages. Duplicate content problems are not always intentional. Your work can accidentally match another person working in the same niche. You can also fall prey to plagiarism because someone is stealing from you.

Plagiarism and intellectual theft have become very common these days. There is a lack of awareness, plus people have free access to billions of web pages indexed on, let alone with Google today.

Causes of duplicate content!

There are plenty of reasons behind duplicate content. Some of them are intentional, some accidental, and some are technical. We will discuss the most popular reasons here in this section.

Deliberate copying of content from another source

One of the most common causes of duplicate content is if you are copying content from another source or if someone is stealing your content without your permission. If you commit plagiarism, it will ruin your seo score and put you down in the search results.

Accidental cloning of a post

Duplicate content problems can also be caused if you have intentionally or accidentally cloned your posts again on your pages. Duplicate content problems don’t only occur when your content is similar to another website. Still, it can also occur if you are copying or cloning your content.

Content syndication

As we have told you before, duplicate content might not be your fault. There is always a chance that you might have created original content duplicated by another website. If a site is using your content without your permission or without giving credits, it will also damage your rankings. This stealing of content is also known as scrapping, and you must know that it increases as you get popular on the web.

Misunderstanding the URL concept

Sometimes developers use content management systems to power their sites and keep track of their content in the database. Some of these systems confuse the same article as a unique one because it comes through a different URL. You must know that the article’s id is the only thing that makes the article unique in the eyes of the developer and the content management system. Still, in the search engine’s eyes, a unique URL shows unique content. So if the content exists in several URLs, it simply creates duplication.