The term ‘duplicate content’ alludes to pieces of information that appear in multiple locations online. For years, many in the search engine optimization industry have been believing that this form of content adversely affects search rankings. Even you might have thought so in the case you have been part of an SEO training Ernakulam based institute.
However, the recent revelation of Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, is that it is not one of the ranking factors. That is to say, the same piece of information across multiple webpages would not make a website rank lower on Google search results.
As for Mueller, it is common for websites to have some duplicate content. Google algorithms are made to deal with it. While Mueller touched upon this matter recently, it was brought up once more in Google Search Central office-hours held on January 2020 last week.
It is one of the topics that often pop up amongst search engine optimization professionals. Moreover, several providers of the best SEO packages check for duplicate content when they audition websites. They have all seemed to have believed the notion that it affects the rankings.
The myth has been dispelled, thanks partly to an automobile businessman who asked about it to Mueller during the program. That person has an auto parts website where the component descriptions are repeated in more than one place. He wanted to know whether that would have a negative effect on search results.
While duplicate webpages may bloat a website and eat into crawl budget, that is an altogether different matter. Mueller did not discuss that during the recent event.
When content sections are being repeated right through a website, like the footer or header, Mueller confirms that it would not send any negative search ranking signals. To exemplify how common duplicate content possibly is, he gave examples that users would always come across.
You would see the same type of content pretty much everywhere when shopping for products or services online. It is normal for online sellers to offer the same item, so the product webpages may share the same information to a large extent.
Google will not interpret the negative signals that come through crawling an item’s description appearing somewhere else on a different retailer’s website. While website footers are technically duplicate content, said Mueller, it is also not an issue in the case of search rankings.
Leave a Reply