Each page on your site should have unique content without duplication. But sometimes it is necessary to duplicate content on different pages of your site. This may confuse search engines as the same content is available on different pages. However, you can easily solve this issue by adding “rel=canonical” HTML meta tag on the header of the duplicated pages. Fortunately Weebly allows to insert HTML meta tags on each page of your site. This helps to achieve many functions including the duplicate content issue and optimize your content for ranking better on Google and other search engines. In this article we will check how to avoid duplicate content issue in Weebly site by inserting HTML meta tag.
Related: How to avoid content duplication with comment pagination in WordPress?
Why You Should Avoid Duplicate Content?
When you duplicate content on same or different domain, you need to tell Google and other search engines which is the original page for indexing. This will help search engines to index only the original page and ignore all other duplicated pages. Otherwise, Google will index all pages with duplicated content and lead to possible penalty from Google.
Avoid Duplicate Content Across Domains
Typical example of duplication is to reuse the content on different pages across domains you have. For example, you can add the same “about us” page on different main and subdomains you own. Though you can create external link to a single “about us” page, it may not look professional especially different sites are talking about different niches. It is easy to modify minor portion and reuse the content on all sites you own.
You can resolve the duplication problem across domains by adding the below canonical meta tag on all the “about-us” pages. The meta tag needs to be added in “Header Code” section of the “about-us” pages under “Pages > About Us Page > SEO Settings“.
<link rel="canonical" href="Your Original Page URL">Here the original page URL could be “site1.com/about-us.html”.
Duplicate Content On Same Site
You may also duplicate the original page content to different pages of the same site. In such case, add the above canonical meta tag in “Header Code” section of all the duplicated pages under “Pages > Choose the duplicate page > SEO Settings“.
Other Possible Duplicate Content Issues
Other than intentionally duplicating content there are many ways the duplication issue can happen on your Weebly site.
Blog Posts
Individual blog post can be accessed from different places as below:
- with individual URL
- each category page shows the blog post
- on blog index page, especially when you have chosen to show the full post
- on syndicated feed content
Products
Similar to blog posts, individual products will appear on product category pages.
Membership Site
You may need to duplicate content for different members on your site.
Home Page
The home page of your Weebly site can be accessed with multiple URLs like below:
- http://yoursite.com
- http://yoursite.com/
- http://yoursite.com/index.html
- http://www.yoursite.com
- http://www.yoursite.com/
- http://www.yoursite.com/index.html
Most of the SEO reports will show you the duplication issue for “yoursite.com” and “yoursite.com/index.html”. In our opinion, no need of doing any action for this, as Google and other search engines definitely know the correct page is “yoursite.com”. Also adding “/index.html” to the directory is a common procedure followed by almost al of the content management system software when there are no pages available on the directory. However, you can setup 301 redirect to avoid any confusion. In addition, make sure https / http and www / non-www versions are properly resolving to a single domain. You should submit your XML Sitemap for the domain which is accessible in browsers.
Caution in Adding Header Code
We strongly recommend not adding <link rel=”canonical” href=”yoursite.com”> under “Settings > SEO > Header Code” like below.
Any code added under site’s settings will appear on each single page of your site. This will tell Google that all pages on your site are duplicated and the original page is the canonical URL you have mentioned under site’s settings. This may end up in disaster as Google may possibly remove all other pages from search results.
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