Google released the third and probably the last core update for this year – the November 2024 Core Update. It seems to be not a major update as not much details are provided and sites are not yet seeing much movement. Perhaps still too early to tell. Read more about it below:
Google Releases The November 2024 Core Update
Google released the November 2024 Core Update last Monday – November 11, 2024. It is expected to complete in two weeks. According to the announcement, the update is designed to continue their work to improve the quality of their search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.
This is the third and probably last core update for this year. Not much details have been provided about this core update so it seems to be not as major as the previous 2 core updates last March and August.
As for how sites are faring, it seems that not much movement is being felt so far, perhaps it is still too soon to tell.
How To Avoid Duplicate Content
In this week’s episode of SEO Made Easy, Martin Splitt of the Google Search Team talks about how to manage duplicate content and streamline your site’s indexed pages. He provides three tips to help website owners avoid duplicate content.
Splitt also talks about how some people think that duplicate content influences the perceived quality of a site, but that it doesn’t. It does cause challenges for site owners because it becomes harder to track the performance of their pages with duplicates, how content with similar pages may compete with each other, and it can cause pages to take longer to get crawled if duplicate content happens at a larger scale. It is something that might need cleaning up but not something so important to lose sleep over.
In search console, users might encounter reasons for why a page is indexed such as duplicate without user selected canonical, alternate page with proper canonical tag, or duplicate – Google chose different canonical than user. These are not problems. They are reasons why a page was not indexed, but if it is a duplicate, it means that Google has found the same or very similar content with a different URL and indexed that instead. So the content is in Google, just not under the URL mentioned in the report. This also happens sometimes in internation sites where multiple language versions are very similar to each other. This is also fine.
So how do we handle this? With duplicate without user-selected canonical, this means that Google bot found the same content with different URLs and this is the URL that Google did not choose to index. Google made the decision because there is no signal in the HTML – a canonical tag that specifies the canonical url to help Google decide which of the possible many URLs to index for this page (the original content or preferred version to be indexed). Tha canonical tag is often used incorrectly by site owners so Google can’t rely on it and just treats it as a hint, but might still choose a different URL anyway. To fix this issue and get another (your preferred URL) indexed, you can specify the url in the html tag or an http header.
For the duplicate – Google chose different canonical than user, it usually happens if there are links pointing to another URL instead of what the canonical declares. To fix this, look for internal links pointing to this URL and change them to point to your desired canonical URL instead. For links from other sites, try configuring your server to redirect to the canonical url instead. If you choose to redirect, consider using a 301 redirect to avoid performance issues for users, as their browsers will remember this redirect and avoid unnecessary network round trips.
Last tip is, if you find you have multiple similar pages, even if Google does not consider them duplicates, try to combine them. This makes information easier to find for your users, will make reporting in Search Console easier to work with, and reduce clutter on your site. Revisit your site from time to time to see if things can be simplified and combined.
Check out the video below:
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