Is Repeat Info on a Website Bad for SEO?

Are you here to know details about duplicate content and its effect on SEO? If you have heard terrifying stories of Google penalties for using repetitive content, then let me clear that it’s not like that. Although repetitive content may affect the visibility of your website, it does not cause you penalties until you don’t use it to deceive anyone. To understand this topic, let’s shed a detailed light on duplicate content and its impact on SEO.

KeyTakeaways

• Information or piece of content that appears on more than one page or location is known as duplicate content. It may be a product description, paragraph, piece of content, some lines, or a whole web page.
• Three types of duplicate content are on site, near to duplicate and off site.
• Duplicate content can reduce your visibility and reduce the organic traffic
• You can use canonical tags, more additional information in content, and regular content monitoring helps you to resolve the duplicate content issues.

Why is Having Duplicate Content a Problem for SEO?

Sometimes, having duplicate content is not intentional. For example, you use the same product description on a website’s various pages. Google consistently ranks the genuine, authentic, and user-friendly content for users. Let’s make it clear what Google says about the ranking of content.
Google says
“Google tries hard to rank the pages with the distinct information.”
This means that, unlike all SEO techniques and strategies, if your web page doesn’t have distinctive information, it will not get enough organic ranking. If you have a website with many pages with duplicate content, then there are two possibilities.

• Google will be confused about which page is real and needs to rank against a certain query, and you will not get organic clicks.
• Google does not derank your web page; instead, it refuses to index it.

If you are content scraping (copying content from other websites without permission), there are chances you will be penalized and your website banned. But this happens in very rare cases.

Types of Duplicate Content

Following are the three main types of duplicate content

Tips to Avoid Repetitive Content Penalties

Following are some practical tips to avoid Google penalties for repetitive content

• Use canonical tags to mention the preferred page. Canonical tags are the way of adding a sign for the Google bots to inform them about the original page, and copy pages. Make sure that you mention canonical tags for all the pages properly, otherwise, you can lose a huge organic traffic.
• Use the internal links to guide the bots and the users to the most relevant content. Internal links are a good way to tell both bots and the users about relevant sub pages of your website.
• Regularly go for the content audit, check the content for duplication, and resolve them.
• Create informative, engaging, and user-friendly content to enhance your user experience. You must follow the best tips for content optimization, such as researching properly on your topic, getting ideas from various websites, writing original and research-based content with some extra piece of information that no one has mentioned earlier, add internal and external links, maintaining a proper hierarchy of headings (H1, H2, H3 and H4), add relevant images and use easy and understandable language.

You can also read more: How to create a winning B2B SEO strategies?

Google’s official statement for Duplicate content

Google says:

Tools to Check for Duplicate Content on a Website

The following are the tools to check the duplicate content ratio:

Common Myths about repeated-info for SEO

Myth1: Repetitive Content Derank Your Website

The repetitive content will derail your website.
Reality: While repetitive content undoubtedly affects your visibility, it does not rank your website. You can cope with this by implementing more information than your competitors, following search engine techniques, and making sure that you follow all the factors that Google crawlers consider for indexing and crawling so that they rank your web page higher than competitors.

Myth2: All Repetitive Content Causes Penalty

It’s a general perception that repetitive or duplicate content gets you into the penalty list of Google. But it’s not like that.
Reality: Google is not habitual to put you on the penalty list. However, it will remove the pages with repetitive content or lower the visuality of such pages. Additionally, if you take the idea from a website and add more informational pieces of content to it without keyword stuffing, it will be indexed and prevent you from penalties. Google only causes penalties if you break the rules and use misinformation or deceiving content.

Myth3: Scraping Content Will Derank Yours

Are you worried that scrappers will derail your content? Well, it’s not like that.
Reality: A scrapper’s content with no additional or informational value can derail your website. Because Google has the guts to analyze that, it’s irrelevant; however, in some scenarios, it happens. In such cases, contact the website host and ask him to remove the content or contact the Google help centre and request them to remove the content under Digital Millennium Copyright Act by completing Google’s Legal Troubleshooter.

Myth4:Posting Guest Posts on Your Website Will Hurt Your SEO

It’s also a myth that reposting your Guest’s posts on your website will hurt your SEO. Many of you may want to publish guest posts on your website to get more views but are worried about this myth. Let’s make it clear.
Reality: When you repost guest posts on your website, you must add an HTML tag. This tag will allow Google to distinguish the original post from the repost version.

Myth5: Google can Detect the Original Author

Reality: Google can not detect the original author, and it is very easy for content thieves and scrappers to copy and paste your content on their websites and claim it belongs to them. To address this issue, contact the Google support centre and request that the duplicate content be removed.

Conclusion

There are many myths about repeat content and Google penalties. Well, repeat content does not get you penalized every time due to repeat content. However, your visibility and organic traffic decrease. Using canonical tags, internal links, and informational content with user-oriented intent can help you prevent the harmful impacts of repetitive content on SEO.

Frequently Asked Questions