Duplicate Content & SEO

Friday October 09, 2015

A recent study from Raven Tools exposed a widespread onsite issue affecting more than a quarter of websites today.

Using Raven’s Site Auditor Tool, the team crawled 200 million pages. The results unearthed more than 4 billion issues – mainly in code. Staggeringly, Raven found that the average site had around 4,500 issues related to search engines.

Despite the overwhelming amount of coding issues, one of the most significant issues was found to be on pages. Duplicate content became a trend throughout the audit. Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. It becomes difficult for search engines to determine which version is most relevant to the search at hand. Thus, search engines rarely show duplicates and defer to the version that is most likely to be the original or best.

Twenty-nine percent of pages crawled by the Auditor Tool were found to have duplicate content. Beyond that, 22% of title tags were exact duplicates and 17% of meta descriptions were duplicated as well.

The good news is that around 83% of websites were using Google Analytics to track their traffic – a number significantly higher than past years.

Still, with this much duplicate content, there is a clear need to audit many of the pages in websites in place today. The team of web developers at Silicon Beach Digital is well versed in building unique content. Our onsite reviews can guide you to places with too much repetition and ensure that the content you produce is distinctive.

Contact our team to hear how you can optimize your web presence with original content.

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