Do you know if you have a duplicate content on your therapy website?
Today, I’m going to teach you how to know if you have duplicate content, and if you do, how to remove it from your website.
What is Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content is content that appears on your website in more than one place.
Why Does Duplicate Content Matter?
Search engines will rarely show multiple pieces of duplicate content. If duplicate content is present on your website, then your website is going to suffer rankings and traffic losses, because search engines don’t want to provide inaccurate or irrelevant results.
You definitely want to make sure that if you have duplicate content on your website, you remove it immediately so you can improve your rankings and traffic to your website.
What Causes Duplicate Content?
Duplicate content could be caused by many different things.
One reason that your end up with duplicate content is that multiple pages on your website have the same text.
A great example of this may be your couples counseling page. If your couples counseling page and your marriage counseling page are almost identical, except for a few words here and there, they’re considered the same page by Google.
If you have two different pages that are very similar like couples counseling and marriage counseling, now’s the time to update the content on those pages.
Another thing that causes duplicate content is if you have several different categories for your blog posts. We recommend that you have five to seven categories for your blog posts, depending on how many specialties you have.
If you have 10+ different categories and if you’re tagging or using the same category for multiple blog posts, this is going to cause a lot of duplicate content. Limit the number of blog categories you have so that Google isn’t reading all of your different blog posts as duplicate content.
A third thing that causes duplicate content is that you replace pages on your website with a newer version and don’t delete the previous version.
If you’re going into your website and you’re creating new pages, make sure that you go back and delete old pages that have the same content.
How Do You Test for Duplicate Content on Your Website?
We recommend using a great tool called Siteliner. Simply type in your URL for your website and it’s going to tell you the percentage of duplicate content that you have on your site.
Visit Siteliner’s website, see if you have any duplicate content, and see if that’s what causing your site not be ranking as high as it possibly could be. This tool also allows you to click to see where the duplicate content lives on your site. You can click and see what pages are being viewed as duplicate content and you can actually go back and fix those pages.
How Do You Remove Duplicate Content from Your Website?
There’s a few different ways you can remove duplicate content from your website:
- Simply delete the old pages
- Re-write pages that are seen as duplicate to be more unique
- De-index your blog post category pages – if you have any questions about de-indexing your category page, please comment on this post and I’d be more than happy to let you know how to do that.
If you want to learn more about duplicate content, read this article.