Study: 29% Of Sites Face Duplicate Content Issues & 80% Aren’t Using Schema.org Microdata

A new study from Raven Tools has uncovered a few major on-page elements being overlooked today, with a major offender being duplicate content. According to the results, 29 percent of websites are dealing with duplicate content, and furthermore, a whopping 80 percent of websites aren’t currently using microdata.

This study leveraged Raven’s Site Auditor Tool to uncover more than 4 billion issues over 200 million page crawls. Site Auditor is an industry-leading on-page reporting tool that looks into code and search issues when implemented across a site. It turns out that the average site has 4,500 issues related to search (according to factors determined by Raven).

One of the biggest organic pitfalls uncovered was the continued issue of duplicate content. Outside of the duplicate pages, Raven found that 22 percent of title tags were exact duplicates, and 17 percent of meta descriptions were also duplicated.

While schema.org microdata implementation has been all the rage of late, the execution hasn’t, apparently. Only 20 percent of sites are leveraging microdata. A survey last year showed that 36 percent of results in the SERPs were displaying Schema markup. Additionally, with the recent indications that microdata may play a factor in determining rankings, we’d expect to see this number jump in the next set of survey results.

The study also uncovered that Google has a stranglehold on the analytics space with 83.13 percent of sites using Google Analytics for tracking. This number is significantly higher than previous reports, which have shown numbers of 52 percent and 59 percent for Google Analytics use.

The full study shows detailed error and issue metrics from Site Auditor, including the fact that the average site has 4,500 issues, including more than 250 link issues and a staggering 3,672 image issues on average. Head over to Raven for full report details.

Images used courtesy of Raven Tools.

EDIT: Aaron Bradley from EA  pointed out that schema.org and microdata are different entities and not a descriptive way to report a metric. We reached back out to Raven confirmed that the 80% of sites not using Schema.org microdata in fact don’t have an occurrence of “itemtype” anywhere on their site.

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.