It doesn’t matter if you manage a website for a small business or a large corporation; every site is vulnerable to the threat that duplicate content poses to SEO rankings.

It’s hard to imagine why one would copy content from another site, but when it happens, it can be disastrous for businesses that are trying to optimize for SEO. The dangers of duplicate content are well-documented. Google (and other search engines) can penalize a website for having too much of it on a single page, or even across a website. Duplicate content may also lower the ranking of a webpage in search results, which could hurt your company's business.

In this article, I’ll show you how to find duplicate content, identify which of your website’s pages are affected, and eliminate the issue altogether.

What Is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is a term you've probably heard before, but do you know what it really is? The definition may seem simple enough: duplicate content refers to blocks of content that are either completely identical to one another (exact duplicates) or very similar — including common near-duplicates. Of course, having some similar content is natural and sometimes unavoidable (i.e., quoting another article on the internet). But what does this mean for your website?

The Two Different Types of Duplicate Content

There are two types of duplicate content:

• Internal duplicate content is when one domain (one website, for example, www.example.com) creates duplicate content through multiple internal URLs (on the same website). For example, example.com creates a page for SEO Services and then another for SEO Content Services but they use the exact same content on both pages.

• External duplicate content, also known as cross-domain duplicates, occurs when two or more different domains (eg example.com and test.com) have the same page copy.

Is Duplicate Content Bad For SEO?

In short, yes, duplicate content is bad for SEO. However, Google does not officially penalise sites for duplicate content, the company does not believe it is a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines. That being said, Google will filter out duplicate pages for indexing, which is the same thing as a penalty — you lose rankings when Google removes duplicate pages from its index.

Duplicate content can confuse search engines and force them to choose which of the identical pages they should rank in the top results. Regardless of who produced the content, there is a high probability that the original page will not be the one chosen for top ranking.

It is important to avoid having duplicate content when possible and when this is not feasible, a way to deal with it is to create a canonical URL. A canonical URL tells search engines which URL of those available it should consider the preferred one, even if that particular URL is not the original one.

External Duplicate Content Issues

If you have significant content, especially valuable content, there's a good chance that other sites will want to republish it. This can be flattering and you might want to consider allowing them to do so. However, you should take into account the negative SEO impacts this can have before allowing someone to republish your content.

Here are the different ways duplicate content occurs externally (off your website):

Scraped Content

Scraped content is one of the most common issues that you’ll stumble upon on the internet. In short, a scraped article is a plagiarised piece of text that is published in an online source. A webmaster plagiarises an article so their website may appear among the top search results.

The web’s a big place, and some people don’t play nicely — which means your hard work can be used without your knowledge. It’s important to protect your content from being misused. If you suspect that a competitor is scraping your site, reporting them to Google can help resolve the issue. Just make sure you have enough evidence to back up your claim — Google will know if you’re trying to manipulate their search results!

If you find scraped content from your website on other websites, you should inform Google by reporting the webspam under the “Copyright and other legal issues” option.

Syndicated Content

When you syndicate your content on other websites, you're giving them permission to republish it. If they do create a post with your content, be sure that they link back to your site. Having content syndicated across multiple websites can boost your SEO and increase discoverability, but this strategy isn't for everyone. Remember, this strategy is a little bit of a trade-off. You're allowing the negative impact of the duplicate content, in exchange for the positive of obtaining backlinks.

Internal Duplicate Content Issues

Product descriptions

The problem of product description duplication occurs when different merchants use the same description of a product to promote it on multiple websites. Merchants should take the time and effort to create product descriptions that are original and captivating — and one way to do this is to include specific information about the product (eg. how it was made and where it came from). This helps customers learn more about the product, which increases the likelihood of them purchasing it.

Product variations — colour, size, flavour, etc. — should ideally be accessible from a single page. Using web design elements like drop-down menus and tabs is convenient for customers because they don't have to hunt through a website to find what they're looking for and can assist in avoiding duplicate content.

URL Parameters

Slight changes to a website's URL structure can create issues such as duplicate content or indexing problems. For example, some e-commerce websites use URL parameters to create page URL variations (e.g., ?sku=34587, &primary-color=pink, &sort=highest-price) — which might lead search engines to index different versions of the URLs, including the parameters.

On-Page Elements

Avoid duplicate content issues by making each page on your website unique — this is essentially a best practice. ensure that each page has:

• a unique page title and meta description

• a unique set of headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) that differ from other pages on your website

The meta title, meta description, and other headings all makeup for a small portion of your website's content, but it's important to make sure that these don't contain duplicate content. We ensure we audit all of our SEO clients sites once per month to check for duplicate content including duplicate heading tags, titles and meta descriptions. We’d advise you to do the same if possible.

While Google may choose to use a snippet of text as a meta description, it's still best to include one when creating a page or post. Google may pull content from your copy, but it might not always be totally relevant to the user when scanning the search results page — and if nothing else, having a meta description has been shown to improve click-through rates.

WWW, HTTP, and Trailing Slash’s

Avoiding duplicate content isn't just for incoming links; it should be a top priority for your internal pages as well. As part of their SEO strategy, SEOs should be sure to avoid URL duplication within their own websites. Make sure that each page has its own unique URL, and always double-check links to make sure they go where you think they go!

Internal duplicate content can occur because of URLs with:

• www (http://www.example.com) and without www (http://example.com)

• http (http://www.example.com) and https (https://www.example.com)

• a trailing slash (http://www.example.com/) and without a trailing slash (http://www.example.com)

It's important to use the same URL structure across all of your types of links — whether they point to your home page, a specific product page, or an external site. The most important reason for using the same domain structure throughout your entire website is because of search engine rankings — Google and Bing both prefer websites that are structured in a logical way.

The easiest way to check for these kinds of issues is to invest in software that will automatically alert you to these issues. Investing in a good SEO company with a whole host of software at its fingertips is a worthwhile investment for any company.

Copying is never a good idea. If a company uses content from another company, it’s stealing. And if you copy content, you’ll be caught and you’ll be punished, probably harshly. Nobody’s ever gotten ahead by plagiarising someone else’s work. Take the time to produce original content for your own site, or hire someone to help you create something unique.

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