The Importance of Blog Duplicate Content Checking

Duplicate content is bad for SEO and can be a serious legal issue. It can happen in two different ways – either someone else steals your content and publishes it on their website (this is known as external duplicate content), or your site has multiple copies of the same page.

Identifying Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is “content within a website or across domains that matches other content or is appreciably similar.” Duplicate content can be produced in various ways, from scrapers republishing blog posts and editorial content to sites that allow the same page to be accessible via multiple URLs.

Internal duplicate content can also be difficult to identify. A common example occurs when a WordPress blog doesn’t use excerpts and shows the full text of each post on the homepage and the individual post pages. This creates four versions of each article on your site, each competing with one another for search engine rankings.

Fortunately, fixing internal duplicate content issues using canonical tags or redirecting the content to the preferred version is easy. However, the same external content can be more complicated to deal with. Fortunately, there are several blog duplicate content checker tools available online to help identify duplicate content and take steps to correct it.

Identifying Plagiarism

Plagiarism is stealing someone else’s words and ideas and using them without their permission. It’s a serious problem that can hurt both the brand and the writer who commits it. It may also result in hefty fines or expensive lawsuits.

There are two kinds of duplicate content: external and internal. The former involves pages on other websites that are identical to yours. This usually happens when businesses use content syndication and don’t properly specify the canonical URL or when they reuse the same boilerplate text in multiple places.

The latter is content that appears on different web pages on your website. This usually happens when bloggers publish their posts on their homepages, in addition to their blogs and category or tag overview pages. This can lead to keyword cannibalization and SEO competition. To avoid this, use SEO review tools to find and remove duplicate material from your website.

Identifying Content Theft

It’s terrible to learn that your content has been stolen. This is one of the most important reasons why costly plagiarism detection software should be used regularly. These tools can help you determine whether someone uses your content illegally on another person’s website.

First, you should contact them and ask that they remove your post if they still need authorization to publish it.

Explain in your email that their website infringes copyright laws while being courteous.

If they don’t remove the article, you can report them to their host, which should remove the content.

Checking the terms and conditions of their website is another technique to discover content thieves. Returning your content will be considerably easier if they comply with the DMCA. Even if they refuse to sign the DMCA, you can still sue them for breaking their terms of service.

Identifying Content Similarity

Many business owners, organizations and individuals use blogs to share news stories, narratives and updates that may interest a particular reader or industry. For example, an independent chef might publish a blog that includes new recipes, ingredients and restaurants readers can try. Or, a tutoring business might publish a blog with study tips to help students prepare for tests.

Even though this content adds value to audiences, it can also be duplicated and hurt SEO. Duplicate content typically occurs when items like title tags and meta descriptions are repeated on multiple pages or when bloggers attempt to cut corners by using the same text across their sites.

While Google can’t find website owners or imprison them for copying content, it does determine search engine rankings and rewards websites that it considers useful and authoritative. For this reason, business needs to check for duplicate content and take steps to correct it when necessary.