Duplicate Content
Avoid posting identical or very similar content across different pages.
- This harms SEO.
- Consolidate similar content and/or using canonical tags to avoid issues.
Titles
Duplicate title tags make it harder for search engines like Google and Bing to determine query relevancy so this needs to be cleared up if you want to rank in the results.
Luckily, the solution is easy. Just come up with an individualized, short, clear title that includes your target keywords to implement on your website. To Note: Try to put the target keyword at the beginning of the title if possible.
Title best practices:
- Include a
<title>element on every page of your site. - Be descriptive and concise.
- Titles should not exceed 10 words
- Don’t keyword stuff.
- Ditch the boilerplate text.
- Brand your titles.
- Clarify which text is meant to be your main title.
- Be cognizant of no index rules and robot.txt protocols.
- Keep your language choice consistent from page to title (if a page is written in Spanish, the title should also be written in Spanish).
Content
Unlike title tags which are flagged at 100%, 85% of identical content is considered the threshold for duplicate content on web pages.
Duplicate page content is a major issue for SEO as search engines:
- Crawlers think you are trying to increase your ranking unfairly and
- Crawlers will penalize the position of not just that content, but possibly your whole site.
- To Note: Frequent misconduct could result in being banned from search results.
Canonical tags
Add canonical tags signals to search engines to focus on the main version of the content.
Use this when there is a preferred version of a page that may have previous pages of similar or duplicate content.