How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues for Better Traffic and SERPs

Most of the bloggers and webmasters doesn’t bother about their site duplicate issues. The only thing we are bothered is about our adsense account, or the website traffic. If its adsense, don’t worry, Google adsense will never ban your account from now. And if its traffic, you need to work hard. You should always know how to avoid duplicate content issues in your websites. No matter how hard you take care about the layout, design, content, back linking, and SEO, you should never ignore the duplicate issues in your website. When I say duplicate issues, its not only about the content or articles which you write, there are many other metrics you to understand in site duplication. Getting into detail, I’ll tell you how you can avoid duplicate issues in your website, and how you can take care of the existing ones.

How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues:

Importance of Robots.txt file

The first important thing you need to take care is your robots file. You should know how to write a /robots.txt file easily. If you have a basic knowledge of writing a /robots.txt file, 90% of your problem is solved. A robots.txt file is the most essential resource in helping your site to rank well in Google. You never knew the importance of /robots.txt file until you learn about it. An improper /robots.txt file can create hell lot of issues in your website growth. For example,

If you have not given a command in /robots.txt file to disallow /tags/ in your website, the robot files and spiders from Google or other search engines will index your /tags/ in your website and create duplicate issue. You might be wondering, how can /tags/ make a duplicate issue in my website? Dude, they will! Check out the below screenshot to check how tags can screw up your site content.

Here, the site /tags/ and /author/ are screwing up the website literally. And don’t worry about the tool bar you are seeing under the results, its just for my reference. So if you use a effective /robots.txt file, you can disallow: /tags/ and stop this duplication issues. Even Google hates to see this kind of duplicate issues in your website. Some times even you might have a risk of getting your site banned from Google. You should always keep the 12 most important SEO factors which can screw up your website.

You might be now wondering, OMG! What else has been indexed from my site without my permission? Well, Google has indexed every single thing from your site. Starting from your post, till the end of your admin panel and etc. This is pain! Isn’t it? You can avoid these duplication errors by two methods.

How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues: 3 Important Methods

Method: 1

You can create a /robots.txt file in your site folder and change it according to your requirements. Don’t worry if you are not good at writing /robots.txt file, Even I’m noob at few things. But I can suggest you to check out the recent article which I wrote on how to write a /robots.txt file easily.

Method: 2

Install the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast and configure the Robots meta configuration.

Method: 3

Go to Google Webmasters Tools -> Click on your site at Dashboard -> Go to Optimization -> Remove URL’s and click on Create a new removal request.

This way you can remove all the duplicate content you wanted to remove from Google. Though the Method is painful for bigger sites, it works amazing for newly built ones. Check your mistakes and correct them before Google takes any harsh decision on your website.

Hope this article helped you in understanding the duplicate issues in your website. Please let me know if you have any queries on how to avoid duplicate content issues in your site.