Absynth 5 browser showing duplicates
Our situation is somewhat different – in that a single page of duplicate content does not a ‘duplicate content problem’ make, but that isn’t the point. However, when black swans were first discovered (in 1697), even a single observation completely undermined the theory that all swans are white – despite the millions of ‘positive’ observations that came before. Using inductive reasoning, they theorised that ‘all swans are white’. For thousands of years, they’d only ever observed white swans rampaging around the local parkland. This is where Popper’s swans come in – he famously cited the example that ‘all swans are white’, which was largely believed by Europeans up until the end of the 17th century. You might try 10 URLs, see no duplicate results, and be reasonably satisfied there isn’t a duplicate content issue.Īnd maybe you’d be right – but not necessarily. Karl Popper’s Black Swansīefore we go into the nitty gritty of how it works, a brief aside on scientific method. I imagine most SEOs, at some point or another, have tried to use the above “quotes” method to check if a site has a duplicate content issue by trying a few random URLs and seeing if they got any duplicate results. The latest URL Profiler development allows you to instead check, en mass, against the one database you really care about – Google’s. Up until now, bulk duplicate content checks have relied upon 3rd party databases with expensive APIs. This is the sort of thing we want to see – just 1 result indexed.īut if you have hundreds of category pages or thousands of products, manually checking each one is not a realistic solution. The most common way to check if you have duplicate content indexed is to do the classic “search for some text on the page in quote marks”. Well before Panda came along, SEO professionals have fought to ensure their websites remain in Google’s good graces by avoiding duplicate content issues. For almost as long as SEOs have cared about Google traffic, they have also cared about duplicate content.