Duplicate content means that one unique piece of digital content is available in more than one places on the internet. The term “places” on the internet would refer to the URLs. If one content is available and linked to multiple URLs that would be the duplicity of the content. It is not only unethical, but it would also affect the search engine’s ranking and would also impact and lower down the internet traffic. Here we will be discussing some common WordPress duplicate content issues. But before starting, let us understand what WordPress is.

WordPress

Based on PHP and MySQL, WordPress is an open source Content management system and it is a free open source. It gives space and platform to blogging, web content, mailing lists, media gallery etc. The characteristics include Plugin architecture and template system. It provides different dashboards for user-friendly access. Being the most widespread website management system in use, it has a client base of more than 60 million websites. Let us understand what is Content Management System ( CMS ) as before going ahead with the duplicity issues, we must understand free Open source CMS.

Content management system

A digital platform that is created for managing, creating and modifying the digital content is known as the Content management system. It encourages a collaborative environment for multiple users. These platforms facilitate users to create unique contents, modify older contents, web contents, indexing, retrieval of older contents, search etc. the content management system has different dashboards and text bodies that may include embedded graphics, audio clips, video clips, pictures, GIF images etc. this is done to create more friendly and interactive content. WordPress is a free open source Content management system. Let us understand what free open source is.

Free open source

Free open source software refers to a digital online platform which can be used by anyone to use the content, modify, take references from it etc. It encourages people to change, improve and redesign the software. Open source is a space that is accessible to everyone.  

Now let us discuss that how on an open source content management system, the duplicate content is created. 

WordPress is a very good platform for small-scale entrepreneurs, bloggers, content writers, web content and indexing, large-scale and new in business industries etc. With an open source and such a good platform with numerous features, this publishing content platform faces a big problem, that is the Duplicity of contents. Content duplicity refers to the one unique and original content linked to many different URLs. This decreases the internet traffic flow, lower down the ranking on the search engines and would get lower visibility. We will discuss the top reasons that may cause duplicity of content and probable solutions to it.

How can you find the duplicate content in WordPress?

It is very important to find whether there is any duplicity in your content created or not. It can be done either by mistake or mostly copied by someone else. As per SeoBirdie, The most common way to check this would be

Go the Google search page and type your website’s name:

Go at the end of the search result page and click “Repeat the search with the omitted results”

The results that Google would show would be all the links that Google has indexed. You can check by investigating the links google or any search engine should not index.

How to identify the duplicity of contents.

• Google search console 
• Searching Keywords and in titles

Some tips and features that can help in avoiding the content duplicity -

URL Issues:

At times the content might not be copied by anyone else, but it may be a URL issue. URL analytics code may cause duplicity in the content. This may occur by some URL parameter like click tracking or any other feature may cause analytic code that leads to the duplicity of the content.

 Tags:

A common issue that is raised amongst the WordPress users is the issue of Tags! When an article is tagged, a unique page is created which id full of other similar and relevant content. The page would pick some small extracts or piece of article or full article. This can be resolved by either using no tags completely or adding meta robots noindexdofollow.  

Categories:

A similar issue like tags, these pages also feature many similar posts and snippets and articles. They would obtain a h1 tag and when searched or questioned about your article, it would show just scrap or piece of article from your complete content. This would definitely not be enough to answer the queries asked. 

Unique content:

The most common issue in duplicity is the original or unique content. If searching for some travel diaries or mobile reviews, the content would be almost similar with different words everywhere. If the travel experience of a country is similar on many URLs, it would create a competition, for better visibility content needs to be creative and unique enough. For every topic, there are several digital write-ups and many of them are copied or somehow the content is the same. To increase web traffic and visibility the content served should be fresh, interactive and exceptional. 

Image attachment URL issue

If you want to add an image in an article, then the final page of the article would show the content and the image. If the viewer clicks on the image, then there is a possibility that it would be linked to the image attachment page. This would not only create a hassle for the reader but also lower down the traffic and duplicate web content would be indexed on related search engines.  

Summary

 It takes a lot of effort and research to create a digital content. Since WordPress an open free content management system provides a great opportunity and a platform for the digital content to be used, studied, read (from the readers perspective) and created, added, modified and supervised (from the content creator’s perspective). This space should be optimised, and duplicity caused by technical issues can be avoided by proper knowledge about it.  But if you do not want to waste your precious time to do it by yourself then it’s better to hire an SEO Company.

Author Bio: Manish Kumar is a digital marketer and blogger. Presently he is working as a content marketing manager at Tangensys. He has been working in this field for some time now and knows how to balance creativity and technical side of content. He loves to write blogs endlessly and share his knowledge & experiences with others.