Having a website full of duplicate content is one of the quickest ways to be dropped to the bottom of search engine rankings. To maintain a successful online business and ensure that your website’s pages are filled with informative and unique content, it’s important to evaluate and identify any redundancies on your site. When search engine robots scan the web for sites to use in results, those with pages bearing over 70% resemblance to each other are quickly dropped to the bottom of the rankings.

Easy, right? Just scan your website to identify whether you have duplicate content and rectify the situation. Well, no. Duplicate content isn’t only determined by onsite copy, but by meta descriptions, title elements and other items you may not think to check. Plus, what if you have hundreds of different pages on your site or templates that have redundant information? What do you do then?

Luckily, there are several diagnostic tools you can use to identify and then alter your website’s duplicate content. Here are a couple of free ones for you to check out:

• Google Webmaster Tools: Get detailed reports on your pages’ visibility, understand how Google crawls and indexes your site, find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site and share information about your website with Google to be more involved in the search and result process.
• Webconfs.com Similar Page Checker: Determine the percentage of similarity between web pages. Simply input the two URLs and Similar Page Checker will give you a quick, precise evaluation.

Once you pinpoint duplicate content on your site, you can then begin to take steps to correct the situation. After you have evaluated and re-worked your site, be sure to continue to monitor your content to keep your pages at the top of search engine rankings.