Duplicate content harms crawl budget and rankings; the eight checks cover HTTP/HTTPS versions, scraper sites, abandoned subdomains, staging environments, dynamic URL parameters, mirrored subdirectories, syndicated content, and appreciably similar pages.
duplicate content is the equivalent of overdrawing your checking account. Except instead of paying costly fees each month, you'll be sacrificing your precious crawl budget.
Do you have duplicate content? You may be getting penalized for dupe content right now and not even know it. Check out this week's podcast for 8 checks you can quickly do to see if you have duplicate content killing your ranking. This week's article is "Don't get duped by duplicate content: 8 quick checks for every SEO" by Stephanie LeVonne over at Search Engine Land.
According to this episode, the eight main sources are: having both HTTP and HTTPS versions live, scraper sites copying your content, forgotten subdomains, unblocked staging environments, dynamically generated URL parameters from faceted navigation, mirrored subdirectories for multiple locations, syndicated content without canonical tags, and pages with appreciably similar content.
The episode recommends manually visiting your site using HTTP, HTTPS, www, and non-www combinations, and also testing with and without index.php. In WordPress you could end up with as many as eight live versions of the same site if none of these are redirected or consolidated.
The episode says the publisher syndicating your content should add a rel canonical tag pointing to your original page, noindex the syndicated copy to prevent it from ranking, and link back to you within the article. Following these steps means neither party faces a duplicate content penalty.
The episode advises merging them into one piece of content if a reader can get the same answer from both. If the two articles address genuinely different issues within a topic, they can coexist, but if there is too much overlap and the content is appreciably similar, consolidation is the right move.
if you have these duplicate content issues and other type of issues affecting these bots, then technically your site won't get crawled as much on her terms. You're sacrificing your crawl budget.
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the key is making sure your content is different enough to warrant multiple pages.
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Full transcript is being added.
Matthew Bertram is an AI keynote speaker, creator of DIG™ (Digital Information Governance), and owner and CEO of EWR Digital. He helps energy and industrial leaders win visibility in AI search (GEO and AEO), is President of ModalPoint and CMO of the Oil & Gas Global Network, hosts The Best SEO Podcast, and has authored eight books including LLM Visibility. More about Matthew Bertram.
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