How can you avoid lower search rankings from duplicate content?
And is it ever worth it?
Find out inside the video!
Hey, it’s Chia from Brand24 and today I want to talk about content duplication.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, content duplication is when you have several versions
of the same piece of content floating around the Internet, and this makes it hard for search engines
like Google to determine which version is the most relevant version that it should be
actually showing viewers.
So, there are a few common causes of duplicate content, such as when you’ve made big changes
to your site, like moving from HTTP to HTTPS, leaving the older versions
behind.
Or even session IDs and different URL parameters can also create content duplication.
And it can definitely occur when you repurpose your content by republishing or syndicating articles
on external platforms like Medium, LinkedIn or Quora, for instance.
Now, content duplication itself is fairly common — it’s estimated that up to 29%
of the Internet IS duplicate content!
Now, content scraping aside, many instances of this are completely self-inflicted.
Especially when you republish content across external platforms.
So, even though this is a great way to boost referral traffic, unless you watch
out for content duplication, you can end up hurting your own search rankings.
Well, this week, we have a few tips to help you avoid content duplication when you go to republish
and syndicate content on external platforms:
So, first of all, if you’ve just hit the ‘publish’ button on your own website,
don’t rush to re-publish your content elsewhere.
Just give it a few days; Google needs a little time to index the original post on your own site first.
And if you rush to publish it somewhere else just after sharing it (on your own domain),
this makes it difficult for Google to index and attribute it correctly.
Secondly, before you re-publish your content on an external website, even if you’ve patiently
waited a couple weeks before doing so, keep in mind that, most likely, domain authority WILL affect
your search rankings.
It’s safe to say that Medium, Linkedin and any other well-known platforms that let
you republish content on their sites — they all have more domain authority than your own website.
So, if you republish content on those platforms, there’s a really good chance that that syndicated
content on another site WILL rank higher on Google than the original version
on your own site.
Which isn’t necessarily so bad: there are pros and cons to this.
The biggest pro is that because these external sites are so well-known, with much greater
readership than your own website, you can potentially reach a much wider audience and
give your referral traffic a big boost, as well as increase your brand awareness.
The biggest potential con is that this could bump your own search rankings for that content
from Page One - which gets 92% of all clicks from search inquiries.
The referral traffic that you get from republishing on an external site could make up for this
loss, but it really just depends on what you’re trying to achieve.
So, one method that people often use to consolidate signals for duplicate content
is the canonical tag, which is a piece of code that you can include on a page to inform
Google which version should be credited for the content found there.
This is a lot easier to implement with internal duplicate content — for obvious reasons, but
definitely worth looking into on other sites.
For example, Medium will automatically apply the canonical tag to content that you republish
on their platform, but ONLY if you import your post — NOT if you copy and paste it as
a new story.
When you import your content this way, Medium automatically includes a link to your
website, indicating that this is where the content was originally published and where it
should be attributed.
If you’re trying to boost referral traffic by sharing content on other sites that don’t
apply canonical tags, there are a couple things you can do to minimize your chances of duplicate
content:
For starters, don’t republish the entire article, otherwise you will end up with duplicate
content and lower search rankings for sure.
If you’re really short on time, just take the first couple of paragraphs and then cap
it with a link back to your original post with anchor text like “Keep reading…”.
If it’s an option, however, I highly recommend quickly summarizing your article in 1 or 2
paragraphs and then closing THAT with the ‘keep reading’ link.
The less similarities that your repurposed content shares with the original version,
the better.
Another thing that you can do to mitigate content duplication is by altering the title
of your content when you republish.
This can potentially help you rank for a different keyword, too.
And always try to customize your content to the platform.
So, if you’re republishing something on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to incorporate
any statistics from your post in the first paragraph.
And if you’re repurposing something for Quora, it’s a good idea to open with an
interesting anecdote.
Despite the risk of content duplication, republishing and syndicating your content on external platforms
is still a really good way to boost referral traffic.
Just make sure you give readers plenty of opportunities to find their way back to your domain by adding
a good amount of links to other parts of your site inside your republished content.
Just make it easy for them to find you.
Anyway, that’s it for this week.
If you have any questions or something to add, just let me know in the Comments section
below.
And if you found this video helpful, feel free to Like, Share and Subscribe to our YouTube
channel where I will be explaining how to do even more in social media and digital marketing
each week.
Thanks so much for watching - I hope you learned something new - and I’ll see you next time.
Bye!