Copy, paste, publish. We all know that plagiarizing someone else’s website content is unacceptable from a legal, moral and search engine optimization standpoint. But what about copying your own content? Why is having duplicate content an issue for SEO?
Duplicate content on your website is a tricky, nuanced topic that’s often misunderstood. Google issued their official stance on the “duplicate content penalty” back in 2008 and a lot has changed since then, especially in terms of user experience on websites – which, coming full circle, also impacts SEO.
So, where does that leave us now?
Let’s explore why having duplicate content can be an issue for SEO for reasons you may or may not be thinking about, and how to strategically resolve these persistent problems.
Duplicated content is, as the name suggests, website copy that’s the same as content published elsewhere. It could be word-for-word identical or it could be content that’s substantially similar, just slightly reworded. Snippets of content, like quotes, aren’t typically flagged as duplicates, nor are translations.
Duplicated content can be copied from other websites or appear on different pages on the same website. Easy to understand, right? From a technical SEO perspective, there’s also another type of duplication that can occur: having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content.
There are a few reasons you may have duplicated content on your website. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you’re not plagiarizing, stealing or scraping content – if you are, that’s a bigger problem than just search engine penalties.
An issue with your CMS can lead to repeated content or you may be inadvertently republishing articles. Or perhaps you use the same chunk of text over and over again in different places – this is common for product or services pages aimed at audiences in different locations, for example.
What does this all mean for search engines? Well, Google cleared up the fact that there is no duplicate content penalty for non-malicious duplications a long time ago.
But having multiple versions of the same copy is bad from a user experience perspective. On top of that, even though Google says they won’t necessarily take action against your site, duplicated content can still indirectly affect your overall rank just because of the nature of how search engines work.
Google and the other search engines want to serve a variety of unique results to users. Having the first page results for a search term show ten different URLs all with the same content is not a great user experience. What’s worse, it begs users to go try another search engine for different, if not necessarily better, results
So, search engines strive to reduce redundancy and better serve the end user by showing a variety of content in the top results. The way this works is that search engine algorithms will group duplicated content into a single cluster and then select one to represent that cluster – and the one that shows up in the search results may not be what you want.
Duplicate content confuses search engines, affects indexing and can lead to inefficient crawling. It can also dilute your link equity, splitting the strength of the content’s ranking across multiple URLs instead of consolidating it under just one.
All these factors can lower search ranking for pages with the same copy, even when you’re not explicitly being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
The first step to addressing these issues and improving your SEO is to identify duplicate content on your website. The easiest and most effective way to do this is by working with an SEO services partner to elevate and support your strategy.
But if you want to know what goes into it, here’s the background.
Leveraging SEO tools like Copyscape, Siteliner or Semrush can help you compare your content with others online, highlighting potential duplicate content. It’s worth using Google Search Console (GSC) too as a way to identify duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, which can be indicators of duplicate content.
You can also manually check by picking random sentences from your site and searching for them on Google in quotes. This can help identify if the same sentences appear elsewhere.
Evaluating your site for duplicate content isn’t a one-time event. It’s important to keep an eye on it over time by:
To help avoid duplicate content issues in the first place, avoid these SEO pitfalls:
Canonical tags play an important role in helping to manage content effectively. There’s a reason why canonicalization is also sometimes referred to as deduplication!
In a nutshell, canonical tags tell search engines which version of a duplicated page is the master or preferred version. This helps the search engine only show one version of your content in the results when you may have similar content for legitimate reasons like region variants, device variants or other factors.
Google decides which is the primary piece of content for indexing and then crawls that page more frequently. You can indicate to Google which page you prefer as canonical by adding a rel="canonical" link element in the header of each duplicated page, pointing to the preferred URL. When doing so, make sure that the canonical tag points to the most authoritative or relevant page.
To proactively address and prevent duplicate content issues, consider implementing the following strategies:
Improve your website’s search engine rankings, proactively address issues and achieve your SEO goals by working with a full-service digital marketing company.
At Kuno Creative, our team of SEO specialists and other marketing experts help you drive targeting traffic to your site with tailored adjustments and insightful recommendations based on best practices and your goals. From monitoring the health of your site to boosting organic search numbers, working with Kuno Creative ensures that your website remains competitive and crawler-friendly.
