What are the Solutions to duplicate content?

Digital Marketing
,
#1

The solution will depend on the particular situation:

  • Do nothing and hope Google gets it right. While I wouldn’t recommend this course of action, you may have read previously that Google will cluster the pages and consolidate the signals, effectively handling duplicate content issues for you.
  • Canonical tags. These tags are used to consolidate signals and pick your preferred version. It’s a pet peeve of mine when a website has canonical tags set correctly and I see an audit that says there are duplicate content issues. It’s not an issue at that point, so don’t say that it is.
  • 301 redirects. This would prevent pages from even having most duplication issues by preventing some alternate versions from being displayed.
  • Tell Google how to handle URL parameters. Setting these up tells Google what the parameters are actually doing instead of letting them try to figure it out.
  • Rel=”alternate”. Used to consolidate alternate versions of a page, such as mobile or various country/language pages. With country/language in particular, hreflang is used to show the correct country/language page in the search results. A few months ago, Google’s [John Mueller], said that fixing hreflang wouldn’t increase rankings but would only help the correct version show. This is likely because Google has already identified the alternate versions and consolidated the signals for the different pages.
  • Rel=”prev” and rel=”next”. Used for pagination.