Free Online Tools To Identify Duplicate Content

Duplicate Content Can Hurt Your Rankings, So Here’s How To Fix It

Duplicate content is a red flag for search engines, and search algorithms are designed to give sites with quality and unique content higher ratings. To avoid duplicate content, make use of the many free online tools available.

The Copyscape Plagiarism Checker lets you enter your website and then checks for duplicate content. It also has a tool to let you monitor the web regularly for plagiarism.

Another free tool is Xenu Link Sleuth which checks for broken links. After a free download, this tool has a number of other applications as well: you can find internal site duplicate content,  identify the largest pages and images for optimizing load times, find the least linked pages and the pages with the most outlinks, find the pages buried deepest in your site, and even identify which images lack alternate text.

A web-based tool that is similar to Xenu Link Sleuth is Yahoo Site Explorer, but it is more limited and doesn’t detect broken links.

Google offers Webmaster Tools which is a free web-based application that has a number of powerful SEO capabilities. You can check for duplicate content by navigating to the Diagnostics page and choosing HTML suggestions. Select the duplicate title tag to proceed to the download link for the table.

When we talk about duplicate content, text on the page is not the only consideration; there are various elements to look at:

1. Title Tags – Rather than repeating the same title tag throughout the entire site, create unique tags for each individual page. WordPress makes this simple with the use of the All in One SEO Pack plugin.

2. Dynamic URLs – Content changes are based on the database behind the results of the site, so duplicate content possibilities are increased.

3. Meta Descriptions – The All in One SEO Pack also makes individualizing your meta tags a breeze. By updating the meta descriptions you further individualize each page and give viewers a better representation of the page contents from the search results screen.

4. Product Descriptions – Rather than take product descriptions from the manufacturer, it’s advisable to create your own. This avoids duplicating not only the manufacturer itself, but also any other resellers of the same product.

SEO professionals and anyone operating a website should pay close attention to checking duplicate content since it can so easily produce issues with page rank. The free tools listed above makes the process of eliminating any duplicate content relatively painless.

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