Find and Fix Duplicate Content Issues in WordPress

Need to find and fix duplicate content issues in WordPress?

WordPress is one of the most popular platforms used for blogging these days. WordPress makes the lives of bloggers, freelancers, and small businesses easy and interesting. You don’t have to put much effort into creating and publishing content on WordPress as there is a plug-in for everything you need. 

WordPress has indeed created ease in many people’s lives. Still, you should also know that this ease and automation have created a huge problem. This problem is known as duplicate content. 

Duplicate content is one of the biggest problems that you can see in WordPress sites. You should also know that this duplicate content is one reason you don’t see many WordPress sites rank on the top. 

Duplicate content on WordPress! What you need to know about it!

If you don’t have the basic idea of duplicate content or plagiarism and are planning to start your WordPress site or blog, we suggest you read this post. 

Duplicate content or plagiarized content refers to the text, the tags, or the image designs that can be found on more than one page of your website or that of another one. A small amount of duplication cannot hurt your SEO score or efforts, but if the percentage of duplication increases, it can easily mess up your credibility and the SEO efforts you have made.

You should know that if your content has large traces of duplication from other sites and pages, it will also get penalized by the search engine.

If you want to find out more about the common types of duplicate issues on WordPress, then we would suggest you read the next section:

Common types of duplicate content issues in WordPress

If you are keen to solve the problems caused by duplicate content in WordPress, then we would suggest you know the types that we have listed below:

Issue No. 1: Tags

Tags are one of the biggest problems when it comes to duplicate content on WordPress websites. Many websites are suffering from duplicate content because of tags. Tag is one of the common taxonomies in WordPress. Users can add tags to their posts in different categories.

Suppose you want to add a tag to your post without setting a proper category. In that case, WordPress will automatically mention it is an independent category. You can add as many tags as you want, but you should know that it will cause duplication issues. The search engine is going to consider the original article and the tagged one as competitors. 

Fixing the duplicate content issue because of tags on WordPress

Now that you know the problem created by tags let us provide you a solution to this issue. You don’t have to worry much about tags as there is an easy fix for this problem. Option number one is to remove the tags from their root. Removing the tags altogether would help you remove the problem of duplication.

The second option is to add robots.txt, and this is also known as robot optimization. This would stop the search engines from indexing the tagged article or page. This is also a rational option. 

Issue No. 2: Categories

The second most common duplicate issue is caused because of categories on a WordPress site. The category pages on your WordPress site would feature all of the posts and articles you have tagged. Categories would have the same heading tags as they have on the original articles. The articles in the categories are considered snippets, which are not a good option for looking for answers. 

Now, suppose you want to solve the duplicate issue created by categories. In that case, we suggest you add do-follow tags and create unique title tags for the articles in the categories. This would help people and the search engines understand that you are not competing with your core website business. 

Issue No. 3: Competing topics

Another duplicate issue that we found out while auditing a WordPress website is competing topics. This problem mainly occurs because of the unavailability of unique content. Many people running blogs related to cooking, gardening, and doing it yourself would face this problem.

To understand this problem, you can take the example of a food blog to find more than twenty baking recipes. Now in every recipe, you are going to find similarities in the ingredients. This duplication of content in recipes can create competition between the two posts. The search engine would consider them as competitors and would de-rank them. 

To solve this duplicate content issue, you can create categories and subcategories for similar recipes. You can also add copies that are relevant to the original topic. The copies would show how, why, and unique from other posts in the league. You can add different categories; one common example is dividing the posts by putting a yearly title. 

Issue No.4: Search Box URL

Search boxes cause another common duplicate content issue on WordPress. The search boxes on WordPress would often generate URLs that can create this trouble for you. If a user links to the URLs created by the search box, then the search engine would consider crawling it.

Once it starts crawling, it is going to index it. When the search box URLs get indexed, they start competing with their parent sites, which messes up the SEO work and kills both of them. If you want to solve this issue, you have to set an auto robot with no index and follow tags. This would save you from indexing but would not get you covered completely. 

These are the common types of duplication issues in WordPress. Now you must know that the above section told you about the technical issues and not the ones caused by human intent. Below, we will tell you about how plagiarism or duplication can cause trouble for a WordPress website. 

Traditional Plagiarism types that you can see in WordPress!

Plagiarism or duplication is both the same thing. Plagiarism is the term that refers to the copying of text, ideas, concepts, facts, figures, images, and all other sorts of content that is already published on another website, webpage, or blog.

Usually, amateur people who start WordPress websites would create content capital by duplication content from other sources.

First, we would tell you about the types of plagiarism and then explain the problem and confusion caused by it.

Types of plagiarism that you should be aware of!

Here are a few common types of plagiarism that you should know and refrain yourself from:

• Deliberate plagiarism 

Deliberate plagiarism is also known as verbatim plagiarism. As the name says, this type refers to the duplicate content created based on intentionally copying contents from another resource. Deliberate plagiarism has two main types.

The first type is known as complete plagiarism, in which the content is plagiarized word to word. The second type is known as incomplete plagiarism, and this is the one in which you would see some traces of unique content.

• Accidental Plagiarism 

Accidental plagiarism is also known as unintentional duplication. This term refers to the content which has unexpected traces of duplicate content in it. If you have created a post all by yourself without any referencing, but still the plagiarism checker shows duplication, then it means that your work accidentally matches one of another writer.

Accidental plagiarism is getting more common every day. This is just because of the availability of a large amount of content on the web. Today, your work would always match with another writer who is working on the same niche. Accidental plagiarism is also considered a threat because it has the same adverse effects as verbatim duplication.

• Mosaic Plagiarism 

Mosaic plagiarism is another common type of duplicate content prepared by WordPress bloggers today. The top plagiarism checker tools can only detect this type of plagiarism. This type of content is prepared by picking sentences or passages from more than one resource. The mixing up of content picked from multiple resources is known as mosaic plagiarism. This type has the same ugly effects and penalties that one can face in intentional duplication.

• Self-Plagiarism 

As the name tells you, self-plagiarism is the content that has similarities with the articles or blogs that you have created and published yourself. Self-plagiarism can be both deliberate and accidental. 

• Spun content 

Today people are also using article spinner and online paraphrasing tools to create content based on old inputs. These tools can surely get plagiarism-free content, but you must know that spun posts can easily be detected and found by simple reading.

This is because the quality of these posts is very low, and they are quite unreadable. An advanced plagiarism checker tool can easily find spun or badly rephrased content.

These are some of the common types of plagiarism found in WordPress websites and blogs. To check and remove the plagiarism issues from your WordPress sites and blogs, you can connect with an online plagiarism checker tool. Below we would list some of the best plagiarism checker tools. Still, before that, we would like you to know why plagiarized/duplicate content is considered trouble.

The confusion created because of duplicate content!

Duplicate content is said to be the killer of SEO score of a website and its credibility. If your two websites or web pages have the same content on them, then it is simply going to confuse the search engine. If “A” is the same as “B” then there is no way to be ranked in the same place or even one over the other.

Search engines are always looking for unique content for ranking them on the higher SERPs, so if your site is having plagiarism in it or someone is stealing from your site, then both the abused and the abusing parties are going down. In worst-case scenarios, both of them can also be penalized.

WordPress sites are also not ranked in the higher places because people tend to copy from these sites and blogs. If you want to ensure that your WordPress is 100% unique, you have to use the best plagiarism checker tools. The AI plagiarism checker tools can also tell you if your content is getting stolen and misused.

Best Plagiarism checker tools to scan WordPress content and complete sites.

Out of hundreds of free and paid tools, we have listed the perfect ones to help you find and remove plagiarism/duplicate content issues from your site.

PlagiarismDetector.Net

This is a very famous plagiarism-checking website. If you want to check your newly created content for plagiarism, then you can easily add text or complete files in this online plagiarism checker. This plagiarism tool would use AI and advanced algorithms to screen out all sorts of duplication from the input content.

Suppose you want to check whether your published content on WordPress is being duplicated or stolen by another source. In that case, you can also make a plagiarism check on your site or blog URL. This free plagiarism checker can easily help you find out the percentage and the exact source of duplicate content. 

SmallSEOTools

The plagiarism checker tool by SmallSeoTools is also known to be best for checking WordPress sites and blogs. You should know that this plagiarism tool allows you to check text, multiple file formats, and even URLs of websites. This free plagiarism checker can be used from its website source, or you can also get its plug-in that you can add to your WordPress site. With the help of this plug-in, you can find out if the content you are publishing has plagiarism in it.

With this tool, you can also find out if someone has already or is trying to duplicate content from your site/blog! The reports of this plagiarism checker are very reliable, and you should surely give it a fair shot!

By using these online plagiarism checker tools, you can easily make an accurate plagiarism check. You can get rid of all duplicate issues. The highlighted duplicate content can easily be removed and rephrased!

After reading this post, you can understand, find and fix duplicate content issues on WordPress or any other website!