 What is going on, everybody? Welcome back. If you're new to the channel, don't forget to subscribe, ring the bell, turn on all notifications so you're notified each and every time we go live. Hey, today is easy stuff. Today is stuff that's gonna make you a lot of money and it's gonna be really easy for you to fix and it's about duplicate content. Don't forget to use that chat section there. Say hello to me, say hi, say something. Tell me what your weather is. The weather sucks today. What is our weather today? What is it today? It is, oh wait, that's Minneapolis. It's negative three in Minneapolis. But today we've got a balmy 29 degrees. It is really, really, really, really chilly here today. And for us in Georgetown, Texas, that's pretty cold. But it says it feels like it's 18 because of the wind. So that's pretty darn chilly. Don't forget to introduce yourself in that chat box, guys. Say hi to me. Let me know what's going on and we're gonna get right into the meat of this training today. I've got to interview right after this. I'm actually interviewing my wife. We're gonna be doing a video on that. I think you guys really enjoy that. I'll put it up on the channel here so you can get it. She's an entrepreneur also. She works in DIY, she works in pet training. She's got all kinds of stuff going on. So that's gonna be a really interesting interview. I think you guys would really, really enjoy that. So don't miss that when that comes out. Matter of fact, if Paul, if you're on here, you are the guy who suggested this a while ago. We finally decided to do it because she's a very interesting person. She's a great personality. It'll be cool. So let's talk about this duplicate content stuff. And first off, let's define it. What the heck is duplicate content? It's actually near duplicate or duplicate content that appears on the web in more than one place. It can occur on a single website. It can occur on different websites, but if it's the exact same content, it's considered duplicate content. Now, why is duplicate content bad for SEO? Being search engine optimization. In other words, can they find your site? Well, undesirable or unfriendly URLs and search results can be like in different types of URLs. So let me give you an example. If I had like jrfisher.com forward slash page and I had information there, and then I also had jrfisher.com slash page slash some other string of information there. Or if I had jrfisher.com slash category slash page and I had the same information there, that would all be duplicate content, even though I had all these different URLs. And the very first one would probably show up in the search results where I said jrfisher.com slash page because that's the shortest URL and Google really can't get that one wrong. So they would probably show that one. But what else does it does? It does backlink dilution. So if the same content is available at a whole bunch of different URLs or different locations, addresses, whatever you want to call it, then each one of those URLs may attract backlinks. Okay, so this would result in the splitting of link equity between the URLs so they wouldn't be worth as much. So that's another reason you don't want to have duplicate content because it's going to hurt you in that SEO stages. And I want to show you, let me see if I can put this up on the screen here and show you guys an example of this. Let's see here. I'm going to get this up on the screen. I want to get it sized just right so you can see it. It's moving on me. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Simmer down. I got this here. Okay, so I want to show you this up on the screen. I'm going to show my screen real quick so that you guys can actually see what I'm talking about right there. Yes, okay. All right, so you should be able to see my screen right now. So here's an example of that duplicate content, okay? We've got the different rankings on here. A day in the life of a social media manager, how to maximize your time on social media in 2017. But you see on the first one here, it is under buffer.com library. And then it's that social media manager checklist. And then down here it's on buffer.com resources, social media manager checklist. And if you notice the URLs have different ratings here. This is 35, this is 37. Backlink says 129 here, but there's a 426 here. Which means all of those backlinks could have been on one of these URLs. And referring domains is 106, referring here is 144. Organic search words is 162 on this one, 29 on this one. And organic traffic is 24 on this one, it's only one on this one. So that's not good, okay? That's not good. That's going to hurt your overall SEO. So we want to, and I'm going to talk about how to find these things and fix them too. I don't want you to think I'm not going to be doing that. But I want you to understand what's going on first. I mean, that's the first step is for you to understand the stuff, okay? If you don't understand something, it's really hard to fix. Okay, so before you get all worked up, know that this isn't always a problem because of how Google handles duplicate content. So in like really simple terms, when they detect duplicate content, the group of the URLs know into a cluster. They then select what they think is the best URL to represent cluster in the search results. But you see by putting it in there several different times, it's causing Google to do a whole lot more work. They didn't consolidate the property of the URLs into the cluster and they do that as link popularity to that representation of that content. I hope I don't get too complicated here. So in the case I just showed you on the screen here, Google would show only one of the URLs in organic search and attribute all referring domains in the cluster, okay? So that's going to hurt you, okay? But that's not what really happens. As you can see, a lot of times it actually hurts your overall SEO. So let me see here, if I could pull this up here. Yeah, I'm gonna pull this screen up here and I'm gonna show you guys this so you can actually see it. There we go, there we go. And I wanna show the whole screen and allow. Okay, so these are the search results when you search Google, okay? And the search I used on here was schedule manager job description. Day in the life of social media manager, how to maximize and you can see this is truncated which is another thing. You don't wanna truncate it, truncate it means you see these little dots right here. This title is too long, way too long, okay? So we don't want that. But as you can see they actually showed two different results here which overall hurt the search results for this particular piece of content. We don't wanna do that guys. That's not what we wanna do. All right, let me see here. I wanna make sure I'm not sharing my content here as I move on to this. Good, I'm not, I'm good. So let's get into this a little bit deeper. Now I can't be sure really how Google sees those two URLs. I don't have access to, you know, Buffer's Google Search Console but it may be that they see both of these URLs as duplicates and one of them will disappear from organic search very soon. So there's no point in actually doing it. Now the third problem with this is it does something called burn crawl budget. Okay, burn crawl budget. So the way Google works is they find a new content on the internet. They do it by crawling these different websites and pages which means they follow links from existing pages to new pages. They also re-crawl pages they know about from time to time to see if anything's changed whatsoever, okay? So this includes your site. Having duplicate content serves only to create more work for them. They can affect the same speed and frequency at which they call, excuse me, it can affect the same speed and frequency at which they crawl your new or updated information. So that's bad because it may lead to delays in indexing new pages and re-indexing updated pages. So it's gonna hurt you overall and they won't find your content. The next thing it does is scraped content outranking you. Occasionally, you may permit another website to re-publish your content. I get that, that does happen. However, that's known as syndication. Other times, sites may scrape your content and re-publish it without permission. Both of these scenarios lead to duplicate content across multiple different domains but they usually don't cause problems. It's only when the scraped or re-published content starts outranking the original on your site and that's when the issues arise. Now, the good news is, this is a rare occurrence but it can happen. Now, the question has been asked over and over again, does Google really have a duplicate content penalty? And I've got some quotes here from Google. Google has stated on multiple occasions that they don't have duplicate content penalty. Matter of fact, here's what they said. This is John Muller, webmaster trends analyst from Google, he said, we don't have a duplicate content penalty. It's not that we would demote a site for having duplicate content. So he says, no, they're not doing that. And he also said, or Susan Moskva, former webmaster trends analyst for Google said, let's put this to bed once and all folks. There is no such thing as duplicate content penalty. Also a webmaster trends analyst at Google, Gary Isle said, D-Y-K Google doesn't have duplicate content penalty. They've all said it, okay. But this isn't entirely true. If your duplicate content is accidentally and not the result of intentional manipulation of search results or spamming practices, then you won't get penalized. If it is, you might, you actually might. For the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with the intent to manipulate rankings or deceive our users, we will also, what, make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. So they're saying right there, yeah, we're gonna knock you down in the search results. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer or the site may be removed entirely from Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results. So right there, you know, they're saying two different things, okay. Now the question is, what counts as intent to manipulate rankings and deceive users? Well, they're gonna determine that. Google has a lot of information out there, but basically, there are a few things they look at. The first one is intentionally creating multiple pages, subdomains or domains with lots of duplicate content. That's the first thing. Or publishing lots of scraped content. That's the next thing. Or publishing affiliate content scraped from Amazon or other sites and adding no value, okay. So as discussed in the beginning of this video, duplicate content can still hurt SEO even without a penalty, okay. Because it's splitting that content. So how does this stuff even happen? There's really no single cause for duplicate content. There's a whole lot of different causes for it. The first one is fasted or filtered navigation and where users can filter and sort items on a page, e-commerce websites use it a lot. We use it. We have fasted navigation on our site. This kind of navigation appends parameters to the end of the URL, okay. Because there are usually many combinations of these filters, fasted navigation also results in lots of duplicate or near duplicate content. So it can and does happen. The URLs are unique, but the content is almost identical, okay. So somebody may find, you know, your clothing or your shirt under, I don't know, men's shirts, another one under casual shirts. So that same content is gonna be there in a couple of different places and your site is actually doing that. So it does create a problem. So, you know, session IDs can also cause it. They tend to append a long string to your URL that can happen. If you have a HTTPS versus HTTP, that can also cause duplicate content. So how do you solve it? Well, you can use redirects to ensure that your website is only accessible at one location. That's an important thing. You can use case sensitive URLs. Google sees URLs as case sensitive. URLs are case sensitive, but pick whatever case you want, okay. So that means that if you had three different URLs and it was like jrfisher.com forward slash page lowercase, the word page lowercase, and then you had jrfisher.com slash page uppercase, those would be two different ones, okay. So how do you solve that? You wanna be consistent with your internal links. Don't internally link to multiple versions of URLs. If that doesn't solve things, you can always conicalize or redirect everything. That's certainly something you can do. Google treats URLs with and without trailing slashes as unique. That means two URLs are unique in Google's eyes depending on how you set up that slash at the end of your URL page. And like guys, if I'm going over your head on this, let me know. If you have any questions, let me know. I know sometimes I'll do some really simple content and it's easy and fun to enjoy. And this is a little bit more in-depth, okay. But these are things that people have problems with and you gotta learn them. So then we come down to how do you solve these issues? How do you fix these things? Well, the first thing you can do is you can redirect the undesirable version, okay, without the trailing slash at the end of it to a desired version with a trailing slash. You should also make sure to stay consistent with internal linking. Don't link to versions with trailing slashes sometimes and without other times. Choose one and just stick with it. That's all you gotta do really. Do print friendly URLs. Print friendly versions have the same content as the original. It's only the URL that differs, okay. So you could have jrfisher.com.port slash page and then you could have jrfisher.com.port slash print slash page, okay. You could do that. Those are a couple of things you could use to fix it. The next thing you can do is you can have mobile friendly URLs. Mobile friendly URLs like print friendly URLs are also duplicates though. Keep that in mind. Example.com.port slash page or jrfisher.com.port slash page or m.jrfisher.m being mobile. m.jrfisher.com.port slash page, okay. So how do you solve that issue? You can conicalize the mobile friendly version to the original. Use alternate to tell Google that the mobile friendly URL is an alternate version of the desktop content. You can do that. You can also tag and category pages. So most CMS creates or content management systems create dedicated tag pages when you use those particular tags. So you can do that. And let me see if I wanna pull another example I don't wanna put that example but it's a little bit complicated. I'm looking at some of my notes here as I talk to you guys. And like I said, feel free guys to put any comments in there, any questions you have. Have you had this problem with your site? And some of you may be listening live and some of you may be listening to a recording. If you're listening to a recording put it in that comment section down there. Have you run into this problem? Has it affected your SEO? Have you wondered how to fix this, okay? So please, please, please share that in there. If you have questions on it, that's another thing. Next thing you run into is localization. So if you're serving similar content to people in different locales who speak the same language. So you may be doing Canada and you may be doing the U.S. and maybe doing Australia. We all speak the same language, kinda, okay? It sounds pretty much the same. So you may have different versions of your site from people in the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada because there are likely only minor differences between the content served to each locale. So the prices in dollars versus pounds, that type of thing, whatever their monetary system is. Now another way to solve that problem is to use href lang tags, okay? To tell search engines about the relationships between the different variations. Next thing you run into is search result pages. Lots of websites have search boxes. We have a search box on ours. Using these typically takes you to a parameterized search URL. So an example would be, it could come back jrofficer.com, question mark q equals search-term because it's really a page that was derived from a search. Google's former head of web span, Matt Cutts, stated that, this is what Matt Cutts says, and he was a genius of this. Typically, web search results don't add value to users. And since our core goal is to provide the best search results possible, we generally exclude search results from our web search index. So that's not gonna create that duplicate URL. Now, not all URLs that contain things like results or search are search results, of course, of course not. But you may wanna not use those because those could get caught up in that filter where they don't wanna bring back those search results. So that's important. So how do you check your site for duplicate content? You could go over to hrefsite audit. I'm gonna say, okay, let me put this in the chat section here. Copy, it'll stick this in the chat section so you guys have this. This is a great way to check your site to make sure, or not to make sure, I mean, you're gonna have some duplicate content, everybody does, but go over there and check that. Okay, you can Google that. They also have a video in there where you can see how to do this. Once it's done, you wanna head to the content quality report. Okay, let me put that in the chat section real quick here. Okay, boom, there is that. Okay, so you wanna go over there and do that. And then look for clusters of duplicates and near duplicates without a conical, okay? Those are gonna be highlighted in orange. And I'm gonna put that in the chat box there so you guys know how to use this. Super important that you do this guys on a regular basis, it really is. All right, put that in there so you'll have that. Okay, all right, so let's go on with this. Okay, once you do that, you're gonna see in the report what you need to work on, okay? It's gonna be, let me, can I show this to you on screen real quick? I wanna show you this content report. I think I can, I think I can. Okay. Okay, yeah, I'm gonna show this to you real quick. I wanna share this page, right? This is exactly what the report's gonna look like in there so that you guys can see it. Boom, there it is. Okay, so you can see over here where it says content quality and we got all the clusters of duplicate content pages in green and then we've got those orange ones over there. You wanna click on any of these clusters to see the effected pages and that way you're gonna know what the page is and it'll give you an opportunity to actually fix it. All right, let me get off of that screen real quick. All right, good. We're moving right on through here. We're making some headways, this is great. This is great today. Okay, so you wanna click those effected clusters and then investigate and figure out the reason for the duplicate content. Then take the appropriate action. Note that these won't always be issues that need rectifying, especially in the case of near duplicates. They don't have to be, okay? So if you're not an HREPs user, you can look for these duplicate content-related warnings at Google Search Console. You can duplicate without user-selected conical. You can do that or you can duplicate. Google chose different conicals than other ones. You can do that. There's a lot of other ways of going about this in not having to pay for service, but certainly paying for the service where it does help a lot. You can also check for duplicate title tags, meta descriptions. I had a bunch of, we just did those. Yesterday I was working on a bunch of those. I had a bunch of duplicates and I had some that were too short, too long. And this is stuff we gotta always maintain. Let's see. Let me put some comments up here so that you guys can see what other people are saying here. Thomas says, it sounds like you have developed a list that covers what you are telling us. Can you make that available in a PDF that we can download? I can certainly work on that. That will take a little bit, but I'll be happy to do that. It may make that list available to you. So yeah, and any questions you have about this, guys, I know this is complicated. I know it's a little bit boring, but sometimes you gotta go through the pain of the boredom, okay, so you can fix the things you need to fix. You can click any of the yellow bars when you get there and you can see the affected pages once you're at Google. So how to check for duplicate content issues across the entire web, okay? So content scraping and syndication can also lead to duplicate content issues, but it's only usually an issue if you see scraped versions of your content outranking you, okay? So that's where you gotta be careful, because if it's outranking you, then it's gonna start directing all that traffic to that scraped page and not the original one, which would be you, okay? Does that happen? Yeah, but it's often more of an issue for the new or weak websites. Why? Because the sites scraping your content are often more authoritative, okay? That sometimes tricks Google into thinking that theirs is the original, even though it's not. So they can actually steal your traffic, which you don't want to happen. If you have a small website, then you can also find scraped content by searching Google for a snippet of the text from your page. For larger sites, you'll need to use automated tool like copiescape, you can use that. This searches the web for other occurrences of the content on your pages. So that's something else you could do. That's a good tool, but some of these tools are also paid tools too. What else can you do? You can use href site explorer to see an organic traffic estimate of your site. And if another site is getting more traffic than your page, there may be an issue. In that case, you have three different options of what you can do. You can reach out and request that they remove the content. You can reach out and request that they add a conicalized link to the original on your site. You can also submit a DMCA takedown request via Google. And let me put that on here because some of you guys may not know about this and you can Google this and you can find out how to do it. Let me copy this and I'll put it and put this in your search bar guys and you will see how to do this. Okay, let me get that thing there. Yes, okay. So now you have that information too. So you can actually go to Google and they will help you out with this. If you intentionally syndicate content on to others' websites, it's worth asking them to add a conical link to the original. This will eliminate the risk of duplicate content, okay? So we don't wanna have that. So that's really an overview of this. I know this is complicated. I said it a bunch of times and I know it is and I know it's not a whole lot of fun and all that stuff, but it is what it is. You gotta do this. Don't stress over duplicate content. It's usually much less of an issue than you thought it would be. If you have a handful of duplicate content or near-duplicate content pages, it's unlikely to be much of a problem. The same is true when a quoting content from another website or other pages of your site, you know, small amounts don't matter all that much. Let me scroll up here a little bit here. But what you do need to be, wanna look out for are the technical SEO mishaps. The things that lead to the generalization of hundreds or thousands of pages of duplicate content, such as improper implementation, faster navigation on e-commerce sites. These can wreak havoc on crawl budget amongst other things. Now, if you have any questions on this, let me get a sip real quick. Like I said, if you're watching this live, you're welcome to put any questions, any comments, any suggestions, anything in that chat box there to the right. If you're watching a replay of this, you'll want to put it in the comment section below this video, and I'll be happy to answer any of your questions there. If you haven't subscribed yet, my gosh, make sure you do that. Hit that subscribe button down there, turn it from red to gray, and don't forget, ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or I upload a video. Guys, I really appreciate you listening to this. It's been a more technical session than what I normally do. I know it's not a motivational session, but I'll do one of those real soon. We need to do some motivation too. I'm trying to be live Monday, Wednesday, or Friday or Saturday. So do me a favor, if you wouldn't put in that chat box, do you want Friday or Saturday, or do you want both? Because I'm trying to switch up my Friday, Saturday training so that I get the right stuff out there. And I don't want to do it like on a day where it's tough for you guys to watch. If Saturday's easier, put Saturday. Just put it in the chat box. Right now, if it's live, if it's not live, put it in the comment box. Either put Saturday or Friday, or put both, whatever you want. And I'm kind of taking a survey on that so I know when to go live. I'm going to help you guys out. And you can always submit questions to me on any of my videos, put it in the comment section. I come back through and I answer all of those and I'll be happy to help you out. Guys, I really appreciate you being here today. I really appreciate you listening to this video, training, live thing, whatever it is. And I'll see you again either Friday or Saturday, depending on what you put in the chat box, depending on what you put in the comment box. Thanks so much for listening to the session. Appreciate each and every one of you and I'll talk to you real soon.