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How to Find Duplicate Website Content

  • September 30 2014
  • Comments Off on How to Find Duplicate Website Content
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One of the hardest parts of creating your own website is worrying about whether or not you have duplicate content up on your site. What if you happen to say something the exact same way someone else has in the past? Or even worse, what if you put content up on your site and another site scraped it for their site, how would you know? Thankfully, there are numerous tools available to help you spot duplicate content and fix it before it causes you trouble with Google.

 

Check Copyscape

One of the easiest ways to check and see if your content is duplicated elsewhere is to copy and paste it into Copyscape. You need to have an account, and while this is a paid service, it only ends up costing about a dime per check. Each check runs 2,000 words through its database and tells you where you have matching content. It highlights anything that is duplicated when you compare the content to what you ran, allowing you to easily see if anything is the same, so you are able to fix it.

 

Find Website Tools

There are numerous tools available that you can use to check for duplicate content as well. Some of them are plugins that you can put on your website to alert you when you experience a problem, while others are external tools. All of them have up sides and downsides, so you need to check and see which ones will work best for you and your website. Some of the plagiarism checkers are even simpler than copying and pasting the content into them. Consider PlagSpotter.com, where all you have to do is put your URL into the search bar and it will come up with any matches it can find on the World Wide Web. It will give you a percentage of content that is duplicated elsewhere, allowing you to see if your information is the same as someone else’s or if someone took your content as their own.

 

Website Tools You Can Run

Another thing that website owners can do is run their own website tools to find out. For a great place to turn, consider running Google Webmaster Tools on your website. Under the tab of “optimization” you should see the title of “HTML improvements”, which will then have the title “duplicate title tags”. Once you are in this area of your web tools, you are sure to locate potential duplicate content that you were totally unaware of. This can help you find any place on your website that could pose a duplicate issue, allowing you to fix it before a search engine crawler notes the problems and screws up your website’s rank.

 

Very Simple

If you have never gone through and set up Google Webmaster Tools on your website, there is no time like the present. These simple tools allow you to keep track of numerous different parts of your website, such as the links coming into and going out of your website to other sites, whether you put the links there or not. This is a great piece of information to have, as that can also help narrow down locations where duplicate content could be tied to.

 

The more you know about the duplicate content possibilities on your website, the more protected you can keep it. There are people and companies that go around and do nothing more than copy and paste website content from one site to another, in an attempt to decrease the ranking of the old sites and get the revenue up on new sites. If you have fallen victim to such problems, these remedies will help tell you that so you can correct the problems before you get penalize

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Cameron Mackey

Cameron is the Content Manager for the Vorongo Blog. He has spent three years in various content marketing roles. When he is not working with Vorongo he enjoys photography and hiking.

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