Duplicate content is content that’s similar or exact copies of content on other websites or on different pages on the same website. Having large amounts of duplicate content on a website can negatively impact Google rankings.
Duplicate content is content that’s similar or exact copies of content on other websites or on different pages on the same website. Having large amounts of duplicate content on a website can negatively impact Google rankings.
Duplicate content is content that’s word-for-word the same as content that appears on another page.
In general, Google doesn’t want to rank pages with duplicate content.
In fact, Google states that:
“Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information”.
So if you have pages on your site WITHOUT distinct information, it can hurt your search engine rankings.
Specifically, here are the three main issues that sites with lots of duplicate content run into.
Less Organic Traffic: This is pretty straightforward. Google doesn’t want to rank pages that uses content that’s copied from other pages in Google’s index.
(Including pages on your own website)
For example, let’s say that you have three pages on your site with similar content.
Google isn’t sure which page is the “original”. So all three pages will struggle to rank.
Penalty (Extremely Rare): Google has said that duplicate content can lead to a penalty or complete deindexing of a website.
Fewer Indexed Pages: This is especially important for websites with lots of pages (like ecommerce sites).
Sometimes Google doesn’t just downrank duplicate content. It actually refuses to index it.
Webpages are considered duplicates if their content is 85% identical.
Having duplicate content may significantly affect your SEO performance.
First of all, Google will typically show only one duplicate page, filtering other instances out of its index and search results, and this page may not be the one you want to rank.
In some cases, search engines may consider duplicate pages as an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings and, as a result, your website may be downgraded or even banned from search results.
Moreover, duplicate pages may dilute your link profile.
Here are a few ways to fix duplicate content issues:
- Add a rel="canonical" link to one of your duplicate pages to inform search engines which page to show in search results
- Use a 301 redirect from a duplicate page to the original one
- Use a rel="next" and a rel="prev" link attribute to fix pagination duplicates
- Instruct GoogleBot to handle URL parameters differently using Google Search Console
- Provide some unique content on the webpage
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