Auditing Site for Common Problems

Discover how to diagnose and fix some common technical problems that almost always arise into the website in this lesson.

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Duplicate content

One common battle that content developers often encounter is against duplicate content. Duplicate content is the situation where we have identical or near-identical content on multiple pages of our own site or on other sites.

Examples of duplicate content

Even when we attempt to create and upload unique content to our site’s pages, there are cases where duplicate content issues pop up unintentionally. Sometimes, our CMS creates multiple versions of the same page that appear on different URLs.

In e-commerce sites where there can be individual pages for multiple variations of the same product in different colors, for example, search engines might suspect duplicate content.

Such pages are nearly identical, apart from the slight differences, such as in the product name. There can be several different variations of the same product. This means that if there are 13 variations of a product, there will be 13 pages with near-identical content. Though a human visitor to the site is smart enough to understand the difference, it might confuse a search engine, making all the page variations struggle for ranking.

Letting duplicate content exist on our site without the necessary fixes can hurt our site’s ranking. The most popular technical solution to onsite duplicate content is the use of canonical tags.

Using canonical tags

Pages with similar content can be grouped together using canonical tags. It’s a marker added to the <head> section of the page’s HTML code to specify the original copy of the page or the copy we want to rank for.

For the example above where there were 13 variations for the throw blanket, let’s say we want to mark the ‘Faux Knit’ color as the main one. To do so, include the following code on all 13 pages, including the original one:

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