How to Avoid Duplicate Content Issue in Weebly?

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 duplicated on different pages. This issue can be solved 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.

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 to be indexed. This will help search engines to index only the original page and ignore all other duplicated pages. Otherwise all pages with duplicated content will be indexed 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.

The duplication problem across domains need to be resolved 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:

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.

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.