How Duplicate Content Can Effect Your Website Traffic

Creating content for a medical website that is engaging, educational and fresh for potential patients can be extremely difficult especially when writing is not your main area of expertise. Because of this difficulty, doctors often end up with written content that is more or less identical on several pages of their website. This practice is known as "duplicate content."

While placing similar content on multiple web pages may not seem like a cause for concern, duplicate content actually has a detrimental impact on how your website is displayed in search engine optimization (SEO) results. Having a website full of duplicate content significantly devalues your overall content, regardless of how well-written or informative it actually is.

Search engines, such as Bing or Google, will not send web users to websites or pages that spew all the same information. Instead, search engines look for web content that is unique, interesting and most importantly, original. Duplicate content forces search engines to ignore the site in which the content is repetitious.

The most effective way for avoiding the issue of duplicate content is to assign a 301 redirect to the page. A 301 redirect automatically directs visitors away from pages of duplicate content back to the original page of content. If multiple pages of useful content that have the potential to rank well on a search engine are combined onto one page, they will provide patients with a far greater amount of relevant and fresh content.

If you currently have two pages of informative content with similar information, consider combining the two pages into one comprehensive page. Even better, combining information into a single page eliminates the issue of the two pages competing with one another for SEO rankings. This will mean positive changes in how your information shows up on search engine results!

When it comes to publishing the final version of your website, it is also important to be familiar with your content management system (CMS). Popular CMS platforms include WordPress and Joomla, which make publishing, editing and creating content for your website simple. Using these platforms, you can easily preview your website to make sure that your web content is displayed exactly the way you want it to appear with no unnecessary duplicate content!

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