What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content is content that is similar to content displayed on other websites or on different pages of the same website.

There are two types of duplicate content:

• External duplicate content
• Internal duplicate content

How does duplicate content affect SEO?

In general, Google does not rank pages with duplicate content.

Google especially dislikes internal duplicate content.

As a matter of fact Google states, that:

"Google strives to index and display pages with unique information."

Therefore, if you have pages on your website WITHOUT certain information, this can negatively affect your search engine ranking.

The following are the three main problems that occur with websites containing a lot of duplicate content.

Less organic traffic

It's quite straightforward. Google doesn't want to rank pages whose content has been copied from other pages in the Google index.

(Including pages on your own website)

Let's assume you have three pages with similar content on your website.

Google is unsure which page is the "original". Therefore, all three pages are difficult to rank.

Penalty (extremely rare)

Google has stated that duplicate content can lead to a penalty or the complete de-indexing of a website.

However, this is extremely rare.

This is only done in cases where a website intentionally retrieves or copies content from other websites.

So if you have multiple duplicate pages on your website, you probably don't need to worry about a "double content penalty".

Fewer indexed pages

This is especially important for websites with many pages (such as e-commerce websites).

Sometimes Google doesn't just rank duplicate content lower.

It actually refuses to index it.

If there are pages on your website that are not being indexed, this may be because your crawl budget is being wasted on duplicate content.

Double content Tips & Tricks

Use 301 redirects

301 redirects are the easiest way to fix duplicate content on your website.

(Besides deleting pages altogether)

So if you have found several duplicate content pages on your website, redirect them back to the original.

As soon as Googlebot comes along, it processes the redirect and indexes ONLY the original content.

(Which can help the original page achieve a higher ranking)

Keep an eye out for similar content.

Duplicate content means ONLY content that has been copied verbatim from another location.

Even if your content is technically different from the content, duplicate content problems can still occur.

This is not a problem for most websites.

Most websites have a few dozen pages.

And they write unique stuff for each page.

Is it a pain to write 100% unique content for every page of your website? Yep.

However, if you are serious about evaluating every page of your website, this is a must.

Use the rel=canonical tag.

The rel=canonical tag tells search engines:

"Yes, we have a number of pages with duplicate content. However, this page is the original. You can ignore the rest."

The rel=canonical tag makes it very easy to avoid external duplicate content.

Google has said that a canonical tag is better than blocking pages with duplicate content.

(For example, blocking Googlebot using robots.txt or a noindex tag in your website-)HTML-Code.)

Therefore, if you find a number of pages with duplicate content on your website, you should either:

• They delete
• They redirect
• Use the canonical day

Use tool

There are a handful of SEO tools that have features to detect duplicate content.

For example, with siteliner You can find duplicate content.

Once you have reviewed the pages, you can avoid duplicate content.

Make sure your page is being redirected correctly.

Sometimes you don't just have multiple versions of the same page, but of the same page.

Although it is rare, I have often seen it in the wild.

This problem occurs when the «WWW» version of your website is not redirected to the «non-WWW» version.

(Or vice versa)

This can also happen if you have switched your site to HTTPS and have not redirected the HTTP page.

In short: All different versions of your website should end in the same place.

Consolidate pages

As I mentioned earlier, if you have many pages with straightforward duplicate content, you will probably want to redirect them to one page.

(Or use the canonical day)

But what if you have pages with similar content?

Well, you can either create unique content for each page or consolidate them onto one mega page.

Let's assume you have three blog posts on your website that are technically different.

However, the content is pretty much identical.

You can combine these three posts into one amazing blog entry that is 100% unique.

Since you have removed some duplicate content from your website, this page should be rated higher than the other three pages combined.

Noindex WordPress tag or category pages

If you Wordpress If you are using this service, you may have noticed that tag and category pages are generated automatically.

These pages are huge sources of duplicate content.

To make them useful for users, we recommend adding the "noindex" tag to the pages.

In this way, they can exist without search engines indexing them.

You can also configure things in WordPress so that these pages are not generated at all.

Make sure the content is the same across different URLs.

Mit anderen Worten: The pages of your website are multiplied by different URLs.

This is the most common reason why duplicate content problems occur.

Let's assume you run an e-commerce website.

And you have a product page that sells T-shirts.

If everything is set up correctly, every size and color of the T-shirt will still be on the same URL.

However, sometimes you find that your website creates a new URL for each different version of your product… resulting in thousands of duplicate content pages.

Another example:

If your website has a search function, these search results pages can also be indexed.

This can easily add more than 1,000 pages to your site.

All contain duplicate content.

Check indexed pages

One of the easiest ways to find duplicate content is to determine the number of pages on your website that are indexed by Google.

You can do this by searching for «site:example.ch» on Google.

Or check your indexed pages in the Google Search Console.

In any case, this number should match the number of pages you created manually.

For example, MIK Group has 642 indexed pages:

If this number was 16,000 or 160,000, we know that many pages were added automatically.

These pages would likely contain significant amounts of duplicate content.