4 Tips to avoid duplicate content

My last articles were quite philosophical for my taste but luckily with a lot of success and good feedback, I am very happy about that, thanks to all the readers and those who spread it everywhere 🙂

But… personally I really like the posts with tips that can be applied in 15 minutes and that can cause favorable changes in a short time, so now something very practical and direct is going.

A problem that many people have, often without knowing it, is duplicate content within their site.

What is duplicate content?

Basically it is the same content found in different URLs and this is not seen with good eyes by search engines, in the same way the content «almost» the same (use only synonyms or change the order of some phrases nothing else) is seen almost as bad as duplicate content.

We must eliminate all exact duplication of our site since the worst duplicate content is the one that we can have within our same domain since Google treats external duplicate content as a minor problem, if we are the first to publish and then they copy us it is a problem of the other.

Practical tips to avoid duplicate content:

1- The best thing to avoid duplicate content of course is ... DO NOT HAVE IT! However for different reasons one might need to have the same content on different pages, so.

2- We can use the robots.txt file to prevent search engines from entering our pages with duplicate content, for positioning issues it is enough that only one of those pages is indexed, the duplicates can be left out of the SERP.

3- If we have pages with dynamic content that we do not want or need to be indexed, we can add the meta:

4- Another way to prevent them from being indexed is to add: rel = »nofollow» to links that point to pages with duplicate or very similar content.

Search engines hold us responsible for all links and content within our site, so fixing these links and preventing duplicate content from being indexed is a must to avoid basic penalties.