SEO Understandings to Deal With the Myths Related to SEO Penalties
The word SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a way of increasing traffic quality to a website by using organic search engine results. The website owners consider SEO to be crucial as it increases the traffic of a web page.
Increasing quality traffic means attracting visitors from different parts of the world. The online businesses that aim to serve worldwide can get potential customers by offering genuinely exciting products. As a visitor clicks on the website’s link using the search engine result pages, the webpage gets traffic.
If the website can establish their credibility through their approach and contents, the visitor may turn into a lead or a potential customer. As this traffic is organic and not earned by paying, the company can use it as an identifier of their business expansion.
Any wrong move with the SEO of sight or unfulfilled attempt of SEO manipulation can be dangerous for the websites. The user can use an SEO checker to avoid these issues.
How does SEO work?
When a user searches for specific content, search engines like Google use their crawlers. They go through the internet, searching for information about the content mentioned above. The crawlers get back to the search engine to prepare an index.
The index is managed as per the algorithm that matched the query fed as the user’s input. The Optimization of SEO is most important for the websites as the search engines use this option in many ways.
They do not only consider the website’s content while preparing the search result. They also base it on the Title Tags, Meta Description of the content. Hence, online marketing sites, including e-commerce sites, try to build SEO-friendly sites. A higher SEO ranking is, on most occasions, synonymous with a higher number of website traffic.
What is Duplicate Content?
If a particular content is present on the internet in more than one place, defined by the unique website address or URL is duplicate content. In other words, if the content is available on the internet with more than one different URL, then the content is copied. Indirectly this duplicate content can affect the traffic of the website, which can affect their business. The website may lose its credibility at the same time.
As per Google’s Matt Cutts, about 25-30% of the internet is filled with duplicate contents. The Google search console says, “Duplicate content generally refers to substantiate blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”
How Google Handles Duplicate Content?
The presence of duplicate content on a website is problematic for the website owners. As the search engines always try to provide a better search experience to the users, they do not show multiple content versions. They only focus on the content, which is more likely to match the user’s query. Each time, this can be different.
The views get diluted, and the results in lesser traffic. As the search engines do not know which page to land after the user clicks the link, they may keep separating the views between multiple contents. They can also show different articles for query results.
Though many websites use some content as scrap content to increase the bulk of the website, it may be why a website has duplicate content. They may have mistakenly published content more than one time. As the search engines try to improve the user experience, the research teams keep on looking for duplicate content.
As per the rules noted in the Google support website, they remove the website from the search results if they can realize that a website is deliberately using duplicate content to manipulate the search results.
The owner has to remove the duplicate content, and then they have to contact the search engine’s team for a review. Some websites use internal links that may get diluted because of copied content to increase traffic.
Simultaneously, if a website uses another website’s content, the original webpage suffers from duplicating content. The original content writer may contact the other site’s host. Suppose the issue is not resolved by request. In that case, the original website host may request Google to remove the content based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The Myth of the Duplicate Content Penalty:
- Many people consider duplicate content as punishment. Simultaneously, it is only how a search engine filters the contents to ensure a better user experience. The only time Google removes the website from search history as a penalty is when the supplicate content is reported or done deliberately to manipulate the search results.
- Google does not straight away remove content if duplicate content is found. The search engines make necessary adjustments with the ranking. If they find out that the website has done it intentionally, then the site ranking may suffer. Additionally, the whole site can get removed.
- The website owner may consider that the website with the original content suffers most because of duplicate content. This idea is, to some extent, wrong. Google tries to find out the source of the content and then show it in the search result. Moreover, Google also designs its algorithms in a way so that they cannot affect the webmasters.
Things to do to Avoid Duplicate Contents:
- The website owner can use a 301 redirect tag on the pages with duplicate contents and send the user to the content’s original landing page. The user can do it by .htaccess file.
- The website host can use the rel= “canonical” Tag. It is a way to say to the search engine that the URL is the content’s actual source. As a part of the HTML head of the webpage, the meta tag informs the search engines that all links should be added to the particular website that is canonized.
- The original owner of the content may get a Google authorship that allows the owner to sign their name to a penned content. It can be helpful for writers who fear plagiarism violations and should make use of plagiarism checker tools.
- The website host can also adjust the parameters and set their preferred domain. It will help Google get to know the website owner’s one web page to compete in the ranking processes.
SEO Checker Tools:
The website owners can also use an SEO checkers to resolve SEO related issues on the website or webpage. The SEO checker tools scan web pages to find technical problems and other SEO related problems. They ensure that all SEO-related matters are not affecting the ranking of the content. They produce a detailed list of errors to fix the issues to improve their website.
