SEO competition is one of the most challenging missions in online marketing but there are few marketers realize that duplicate content on their sites is oftentimes the primary culprit for not ranking well.
And the most exposed types of websites are thin affiliate sites, ecommerce sites, submission sites with few submissions and blogs.
So how can you tell?
Begin by inspecting the overall configuration of your website with it's footer, header, navigations and so on.
As you well know, in general these elements don't change as you navigate from one page to the other.
Search engines observe and record each of these repetitive architectural blocks where the human eye rarely pays attention to identical content presented in a natural and continuous flow, like in the web surfing process.
Ecommerce websites.
Duplicate content appears on ecommerce sites because of their "sketchy" nature; these sites are designed to contain short descriptive tags and a descriptive picture for each product featured.
Duplicate content issue makes its entry when the content container is outweighed by template's total number of words.
Keep in mind that Googlebot can't read pictured text bodies and neither classic pictures that make up the template.
The problem can be easily fixed. Of course, with a decent amount of time invested.
You need to estimate the ratio between the (editable!) text contained in the template with the text inserted in the editable zone - e.g. where you embed the product for sale. Let me show you:
All you need to is copy and paste the entire web page into a word process eliminate all commercial related text so that you remain with only the template; count the number of words contained by your template. Hold on to it!
Once you have the number, create some unique text, more than you have in the page template. This will pull down the dupe red flag and also differentiate your webpage among similar product pages (from an SEO perspective).
The title tag is the most sensitive page element when it comes to onsite duplicate content.
It goes without saying that no two webpages should have the same title tag.
Hot tip: don't use stop words to make subtle differences between your title tag variations. Stop words are a well defined group of words that Google "neglects" using them when evaluating site or page relevancy for queried keywords.
Another duplicate content scenario includes heavily used product reviews and guidelines throughout multiple ecommerce sites.
This problem relates better with affiliate websites and is presented below.
Affiliate websites.
As big MLM and Network Marketing companies are gaining ground in the online market, search engines witness a flood of thin affiliate sites that all what a small piece of the big mama's pie. So what do search engine do: they literally wipe out small affiliate sites competing in the SERPs for those particular keywords.
Google's main goal is to deliver only the most relevant websites for representative terms queried. And these sites are generally those with big budgets to invest in link building and other optimization strategies.
The truth is that affiliate sites, as they are delivered first hand, are useless when it comes to ranking in the search engines. The big problem is that they are all the same - and this is called offsite duplicate content.
Your affiliate site will rank if you use this exact formula:
1. Rewrite the offer and make the content textually unique - your not just another affiliate website for the company X in Google's index.;
2. Bring conceptually unique content - argument what separates you from the other affiliates competing for the same product/service; give the product a new perspective, associated with you as a marketing brand - this build authority throughout the community and helps build inbound links;
3. Very Important: increase the number of web pages. Your website should be a comprehensive encyclopedia for the product and the market it represents. Presenting "incredible" offers without adding value won't cut it with the search engines. These robots feed on fresh and valuable content. Understand this single aspect and you've dominated your niche.
Blogs.
Even though this type of website is the perfect solution to prevent bad content management, there are some subtle mistakes that can generate duplicate content situations.
How to avoid generating duplicated content on blogs:
1. Include each post in the category that best suits it's tone and theme. Never cross include the same article on separate categories;
2. Working with the "More" feature. Include it early on in each individual post;
3. Use the nofollow tag or block the search engine from indexing sections like archives, featured authors section, popular posts, etc. In addition, a permanent access block can be established directly from the robots.txt file
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