Studies show that duplicate content remains at large.
Of the over 200 million page crawls Raven’s Site Auditor conducted from February 2013 to June 2015, 29% of pages had duplicate content. A recent study conducted by Internet Marketing Software Company Raven, has revealed that 29% of websites have duplicate content issues and 80% aren’t using Schema.org Micro Data.
Common On-Page Duplicate Content Issues
Honestly, you might not even be aware that your website contains duplicate content. Let’s take a look at common issues with duplicate content and what you can do to fix it.
Duplicate Page Titles
Search engines prefer it when your website has a unique page title for each page. Identical page titles could confuse website visitors trying to navigate your site, as well as the algorithm trying to understand the page. Search engines may ignore any pages with the same titles.
Duplicate Meta Descriptions
As with title tags, it is important that meta descriptions are unique and relevant to the content on each page.
Duplicate Pages
The content on each page of your website should be unique and relevant to the keywords used in your page titles and meta descriptions.
What is Sechmea.org Micro Data?
Schema.org micro data is a special way of formatting content in HTML and can help search engines better understand page content. For example, you can use structured data to correctly communicate the details of a person, product, event, movie, book, review, recipe and more. Search engines may also use structured data to enhance the appearance of your search results – known as rich snippets.
Raven’s industry leading on-page reporting tool, Site Auditor, was used to crawl 200 million pages and has identified over 4 billion issues. Site Auditor analyzes all the on-page elements and behind the scene codes on your website, revealing growing internal and external issues. The average site has 4,500 search related issues (according to factors determined by Raven).
The Top 5 Most Common On-Page SEO Issues
The average website crawl Raven’s Site Auditor conducted from February 2013 to June 2015 discovered the following Common On-Page SEO Issues:
Images With Missing Alt Attributes
The Alt attribute provides search engines with useful information about the subject matter of the image. Search engines use this information to help determine the best image to return for a searcher’s query.
Images With Missing Title Attributes
The title attribute, pops up when you hover over an image and is more for the end user. However, this information is still valuable to search engines.
Links With No Anchor Text
Including text for links helps search engines better understand the context of the page you’re linking to.
Meta Descriptions That Are Missing or Are The Wrong Length
The description attribute (a.k.a. meta description) is a short, helpful summary of your page’s content. It is a primary piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on. Search results limit the number of characters they display for meta descriptions. It’s considered best practice to keep meta descriptions to a minimum of 50 characters and a maximum 156 characters.
Pages With Duplicate Content
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Duplicate content issues can cause your website to have poor organic rankings, suffer traffic losses and even be blacklisted by Google.
What Should I Do?
Duplicate content issues have been around for years. It’s important that you take the necessary steps to ensure that your website’s page titles, meta descriptions and copy are all relevant and unique. Schema.org Micro Data is only being used by a small percentage of websites on the web today. Schema markup helps search engines understand the content on your website and can give your SEO a boost.
The SEO Specialists at Kraus Marketing are well versed in Schema.org micro data and can help eliminate duplicate content from your website and improve your organic rankings. For more information, contact us today at 973-998-5742 or visit us online at www.KrausMarketing.com.