Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is simply content that appears more than once online, whether it’s across different URLs on the same site or on different websites entirely. The content can be exact copies or copies that are extremely similar.

While people often fear duplicate content, the reality can be much more nuanced, and gaining an understanding of what duplicate content actually does and doesn’t do is the first step to handling it in a sensible way.

Mythbusting Duplicate Content

Firstly, let’s tackle the biggest myth related to duplicate content, which is that there’s no penalty for content that’s duplicated across the internet.

Google doesn’t hand out punishments just because duplicate content exists online, which can actually happen innocently for all sorts of reasons. What the search engine does do is choose one version of duplicated content to show in its results while filtering out the others.

This means that the true danger of duplication is usually not a penalty but instead a dilution, where your ranking signals and link equity are split across multiple versions rather than concentrating on one. Because of this, there’s a risk that Google could rank a version that you didn’t intend to be ranked.

However, in the case of deliberate and large-scale duplication that’s designed to manipulate results, Google is more likely to treat the content as spam. But this tends to be a different beast from everyday duplication.

Causes of Duplication

The reasons behind why content may become duplicated are mostly technical and unintentional. With many pages throughout the internet reachable across multiple URLs, with and without www, across HTTP and HTTPS, and without trailing slashes and tracking parameters, it’s pretty common to see duplicated copy here and there.

If you’re an eCommerce site owner, duplication can happen when you list many products that are combined within the same categories. The use of boilerplate text across different pages, printer-friendly versions, and content syndicated to other sites can all be contributing factors.

In most cases, it’s no one’s plan to create duplicates with malicious intentions; they simply emerged from how the website was built.

How to Fix Duplicate Content

There are plenty of easy fixes out there if you’re looking to remove duplicate content from your website. The canonical tag is the primary tool, telling Google which version is the master so it consolidates signals there.

Consistent internal linking towards a single canonical URL helps to support this message. Redirects also funnel variant URLs towards your preferred one. When it comes to syndicated content, a canonical that points back to your original helps you to remain the recognised source.

For parameter-driven duplication on larger websites, careful configuration can stop Google from wasting its crawl budget on endless almost identical URLs.

Closing Thoughts

As a takeaway, you should keep your duplicate content in proportion as more of a housekeeping issue. This is because clean canonicalisation will often help your rankings to focus where you want them.

However, duplicate content isn’t the disaster that you might think it is. By auditing your site every now and then with a crawler to find unintended duplicates, and setting canonicals, as well as redirects, to consolidate them, you’ll be able to make sure that all of your content has one single and clear authoritative home.