Duplicate Content Analysis

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place.  This could be on entirly separate domains or within your own site.

If content is duplicated in your site, this leads to competing pages.   It is important to have unique titles, headers, metadata.

Duplicate Page Titles

The title of a web page is arguably one of the most important on-page optimisation elements, its relevancy should be tied in to reflecting the page’s content. Different pages with the same title must absolutely be avoided and each page should have its own, individual page title.

If you use the same page title for different pages, your page title either lacks expression or it doesn’t match the content of all pages.

Search engines identify individual sub-pages of a website via the URL but also via the page title. If you have several pages with the same title, you give away optimisation potential as Google usually only shows one page per domain in the search results. In the case of duplicate titles, several pages are likely to have been optimised for the same keywords, therefore, have little chance of being found for other, differing keywords.

Duplicate Meta Descriptions

If you have more than one page on your website with the same meta title or meta description they are actually diluting your efforts to be found because in effect these pages are competing with each other. … The search engine can’t understand why you would have two pages on your website about the same thing.

Duplicate Anchor texts Leading to Different URLS

Anchor texts are the best way to inform visitors and search engines about the content of the linked page. Using good anchor texts, which contain important keywords for the linked page is best practice.

If different pages are linked with the same text or keyword, the reference is not specific enough. Therefore the optimisation potential of internal linking remains unused. Trivial link texts like “show more” or “klick” should generally be avoided.

Duplicate Content Caused by Server Or Content Management System CMS

Duplicate content refers to identical content that appears several times on different websites. Duplicate content is usually a technical problem or a problem in your content management system because nobody writes the same text or article twice.

Duplicate anchor texts linking to different content

The problem with generic anchor texts.  Such as ‘More info’ or ‘click here’ is that they are linking to different pages of very different relevance causing a negative impact on your page SEO.   The types of anchors used on any web page are as follows.

Exact-match anchor
The text is “exact match” if it includes a keyword that mirrors the page that is being linked to. For example: ‘Bedtime Stories’ linking to a page about bedtime stories.

Partial-match anchor
Anchor text that includes a variation of the keyword on the linked-to page. For example: ‘boodlebobs bedtime story for kids‘ linking to a page associated with that specific search term.

Branded anchor
A brand name used as anchor text ie – Goldtrack

Naked link anchor
A URL that is used as the link/anchor ie –  www.seo-hampshire.com

Generic anchor
A generic word or phrase that is used as the anchor. “Click here” is a common generic anchor.

Image anchor
Whenever an image is linked, Google looks at the information in the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text.