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SEO Audit: Detecting Duplicate Content

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SEO Audit: Detecting Duplicate Content

A site can be plagued by various content issues, ranging from URL-based content issues to duplicate physical content that is replicated from page to page with few changes.

As if that weren't enough, you also have to deal with duplicate content issues specific to WordPress, such as duplicate content on product and category pages.

Finding duplicate content issues is an essential part of your SEO audit.

Here's what you should look for and how to do it.

Easily identify duplicate content issues on your website.

How to Examine

Siteliner.com (created by Copyscape) can assist you in quickly identifying duplicate content issues on your site.

It provides a clear view of which pages have a match percentage and which pages match other pages.

Determine which pages of your website were duplicated across the internet.

How to Examine

  • Copyscape can help you determine which pages of your website have been duplicated across the internet. Copyscape is regarded as one of the industry's standard auditing tools. By utilizing the private index functionality of their premium service, this tool can assist you in identifying duplicate content across your entire website.
  • Check Google's index for plagiarized copies of your site's content from other websites to cover all bases. Simply copy/paste a section of text that you want to check into Google's search bar. This should assist you in identifying cases where it has been stolen.

Examine URLs for Duplicate Content

Identifying duplicate content on a page isn't limited to text content.

Checking for URLs that lead to duplicate content can also reveal issues that confuse Google when they crawl your site.

Check and look into the following:

  • How recent are the content updates?
  • The scope of content updates.
  • The historical pattern of page updates.

How to Examine

Scroll all the way to the right in Screaming Frog to find the Last Modified column. This may be useful to you:

  • Determine how recent the content updates are and the magnitude of the site's content updates.
  • Create a timeline of page updates.

If you're obsessed with your competitors, you could even crawl them every month and keep this data on hand to figure out what they're up to.

If you want to see what competitors are doing in terms of content development, it would be fairly simple to analyze and keep this data updated in an Excel table, as well as identify historical trends.

What to Look For

  • Content that has been syndicated.
  • Additional content that is useful.

Understanding how content is segmented within a site, or syndicated in some way, is useful for distinguishing original content from syndicated content on a site, especially when syndicated content is a prominent site feature.

This technique is particularly useful for identifying thin content and creating custom filters for locating useful supplementary content.

Keyword Visibility

The above trick for creating custom filters can also assist you in determining keyword prominence, which is where the keyword appears in the first 100 words of a page's content.

Keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 Tags

In Screaming Frog, go to the H1 tab and look at the H1, H2, and H3 tags.

Alternatively, you can select the H2 tab. You can also create a custom filter to identify H3 tags on the site.

What to Look For

  • The order of the keywords.
  • Grammar and spelling are important.
  • Reading ability.

Identifying poor grammar and spelling issues on your site during a site audit isn't ideal, and it can be painful, but doing so before posting content is a good step toward ensuring your site performs well.

Use the Hemingway App to edit and write your content if you aren't a professional writer.

It can assist you in identifying major issues before you publish.

Count of Outbound Links

The number of outbound links on a page can degrade its performance.

SEOs have long considered it best practice not to exceed 100 links per page.

While Google claims that the requirement of limiting outbound links to 100 per page has been lifted, there are conflicting reports.

According to John Mueller, outbound links are not a ranking factor. Which one is it?

For answers, look at case studies conducted by others:

RebootOnline.com conducted a study that contradicts this one:

“The results are clear. Outgoing relevant links to authoritative sites are considered in the algorithms and do have a positive impact on rankings.”

Context is important because 100 outbound links on a page can range from 100 navigation links to 100 links purely assembled to form a link farm.

The goal here is to audit both the quantity and the quality of those links.

If you notice an unusual pattern in the quantity of links, it is worth looking into both their quality and quantity.

If you want to perform a bonus check, you can do so in Screaming Frog, though it isn't usually necessary.

How to Examine

After identifying the page on which you want to check outbound links, in Screaming Frog, click on the URL in the main window, then click on the Outlinks tab.

If you want to identify site-wide outbound links quickly, you can also select Bulk Export > All Outlinks.

The number of internal links pointing to a specific page.

Click on the URL in the main Screaming Frog window, then click on the Inlinks tab, to count the number of internal links pointing to a page.

You can also identify site-wide inlinks to all site pages by selecting Bulk Export > All Inlinks.

The quality of internal links pointing to the page

It's easier to judge the quality of internal links pointing to each page on the site using the exported Excel document from the bulk exporting step:

Broken hyperlinks

In an SEO audit, identifying broken links can help you find pages that are showing up as broken to Google, giving you the opportunity to fix them before they become major issues.

How to Examine

After Screaming Frog has finished crawling your site, go to the Internal tab, choose HTML from the Filter: dropdown menu, and sort the pages by status code.

This will arrange the pages in descending order so that all of the error pages appear before the live 200 OK pages.

We want to identify all 400 errors, 500 errors, and other page errors in this check.

Some links, depending on their context, are safe to ignore 400 errors and let them drop out of the Google index, especially if they haven't been found in the Google index for a while.

However, if they are indexed and have been for some time, you should probably redirect them to the correct location.

Affiliate Links

If the goal of your audit is to identify and remove affiliate links from an affiliate-heavy website, the next tip is a good place to start.

How to Examine

Affiliate links typically have a common referrer or portion of their URL that is recognizable across multiple websites.

You can find these links by using a custom filter.

Furthermore, using conditional formatting in Excel, you can filter out affiliate links and identify where they are in Screaming Frog bulk exports.

URL Length

In Screaming Frog, click on the URL tab, then Filter, then click Over 115 Characters.

By utilizing this feature, you will be provided with a comprehensive list of on-site URLs exceeding 115 characters. This invaluable information can assist you in detecting potential problems associated with excessively long URLs.

Page Classification

To obtain a broad understanding of page categories, it is beneficial to utilize the site structure section in Screaming Frog's spider tool. This section, conveniently positioned on the right side, allows you to identify the most prominent pages within the site.

How to Examine

The site structure tab allows you to identify the top URLs on the site as well as the categories they belong to. In addition, the response times tab allows you to identify page response time issues.

Are you checking your website's content on a regular basis?

The key to staying at the top of search engine results pages is to incorporate your website content into your overall SEO strategy.

If you're not sure how to do it, consult our list above to get started!

BizzDesign is a group of digital marketing experts and SEO Brisbane specialists who will work with you to create a content strategy that will propel you to the top of the SERPs and put you ahead of your competitors.

Enhance your content strategy in 2023! Please get in touch with us right away!