There are other reasons you may find duplicate content on other websites such as the content having being scraped and used elsewhere which you’ll want to deal with (that could mean getting a lawyer involved). However, before you start making significant changes like this to a page see the note below About Potential Effects on the Conversion Rate. If you find this to be the case for a significant amount of the content on a page you are going to optimize you’ll need to decide whether to rewrite the content or attempt to include “enough” unique content on the page otherwise you’ll be competing with all those other sites for listings. If the pages are duplicates or very similar content located on multiple websites, this may be a case of multiple web sites using similar content (very common with affiliate or ecommerce sites that use content provided by manufacturers etc). If you get multiple results for a search on unique text, examine the files to see if a large portion of the content is indeed duplicate or very similar.
Then search for it in Google with parenthesizes around the text. Next, I make sure the content on the page I’m going to optimize is unique.Ĭopy a snippet of what appears to be unique text from the page that you are going to optimize. If employing more search engine friendly methods isn’t currently an option, I’ll make a note not to optimize that content since it isn’t being indexed anyway. I also make note of text in images that we’d ideally like change to indexable text. I make note of any issues that we need to discuss with the web developers such as the use of techniques that are not indexed easily by search engines (Flash, content included by JavaScript calls etc). I’m looking to make sure that all important content on the page is getting indexed. I put the cache version of the page side by side with the actual page and compare the two.