Google News and SEO Update August 2021

How to find duplicate content issues on your website

If your website contains duplicate content, the wrong pages might appear in Google’s search results. For that reason, you should check your pages for duplicate content.

The easiest way to find duplicate content on your web pages is to use a Website Audit tool. The Website Audit tool checks all pages of your website and it informs you about errors that can lead to ranking problems.

How to fix duplicate content issues

There are several things that you can do to fix duplicate content issues. Of course, you can do nothing and hope that Google gets it right. Usually, this is not recommended. Better do the following:

Use the rel=canonical tag to inform Google about the preferred version of a page. Details about the attribute can be found here. For most duplicate content issues, this is the best solution.
Redirect the duplicate URLs with a 301 redirect to the original page. In that case, the alternate pages won’t be displayed at all. This doesn’t work with print pages, etc. because you want to display these pages.

It’s not necessary to block duplicate pages in your robots.txt file and it’s also not necessary to use a noindex attribute on these pages. Just use the two tips above and you’ll be fine.

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How Google handles JavaScript

Google can handle websites with JavaScript. However, there are several things that you should do to ensure that Google can index the content of your web pages correctly.

Google wants to show unique URLs

If a dynamically created web page does not have a unique URL, Google has difficulty to show it in the search results. For that reason, your web pages should have individual URLs. Do not create a JavaScript website that uses the same URL for all of the pages. Here’s an excerpt from an official Google video:

“We only index pages that can be jumped right into. […] I click on the main navigation for this particular page and then I click on this product and then I see and everything works. But that might not do the trick because you need that unique URL.

It has to be something we can get right to. Not using a hashed URL and also the server needs to be able to serve that right away.

If I do this journey and then basically take this URL and copy and paste it into an incognito browser… I want people to see the content. Not the home page and not a 404 page.”

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You should pre-render your JavaScript pages for Googlebot

Pre-rendering your web pages means that your web server processes much of the JavaScript before it is sent to the user and/or the search engine crawler. Search engine crawlers get much more parseable content if you pre-render your JavaScript web pages. Pre-rendering is also good for website visitors:

“Most of the time it is because [pre-rendering] has benefits for the user on top of just the crawlers. […]

Giving more content over is always a great thing. That doesn’t mean that you should always give us a page with a bazillion images right away because that’s just not going to be good for the users. […]

It should be always a mix between getting as much crucial content and as possible, but then figuring out which content [images and other non-crucial content] you can load lazily in the end of it.

So for SEOs that would be you know, we we know that different queries are different intents. Informational, transactional… so elements critical to that intent should really be in that initial rush [i.e. pre-rendered].”

JavaScript should not make a page slower

If fancy JavaScript effects make your website slower, it’s better to avoid them. Website speed is important and Google doesn’t like slow loading pages.

“As a user, I don’t care about if the first byte has arrived quicker, if I’m still looking at a blank page because javascript is executing or something is blocking a resource.”

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