Creating original, useful and informative content on the website is one of the basic prerequisites to position yourself well in the search results. However, it often happens that the content of the site is downloaded and published at other addresses, or that the same content is linked to different URLs on the site itself. This is how duplicate content is created. A phenomenon that can be disastrous for the results of your site.

Duplicate content may exist because the site owner created it intentionally, it may be the result of plagiarism, or it may occur as a side effect of poor website management.

What is Duplicate content?

Duplicate content is content that is available at multiple URLs. Because more than one URL displays the same content, search engines don’t know which URL to rank higher in search results.

When, for example, Google comes across the same content on a site, or on multiple sites, the algorithm decides which content to rank. And it is not so rare that Google ranks the wrong content.

The first question that arises is whether Google can penalize the site for this. You will never actually receive a notification that you have been penalized for this question. However, this does not mean that your site will not be penalized for having the same or similar content on multiple pages or even on multiple sites.

“Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears to be intended to be misleading and to manipulate search engine results.” If your site suffers from problems with duplicate content, and you do not follow the advice provided, we will choose a version of the content to display in our search results,” Google says about this problem.

Duplicate content can be external or internal

In the event that copies of the content appear outside of the site where the original or canonical version is published, this is external duplicate content.

Internal content duplication includes copies of content that appear on your site. In some cases, this may be intentional if the site owner reuses certain text, word for word, in multiple places on the site. In other cases, internal duplication of content is something that happens as a result of using boilerplate text.

To search engines, a URL is a unique identifier for a specific piece of content. Just understanding this URL concept helps in better understanding the problem of duplicate content.

A classic example is online stores. To add text to multiple product pages, template text is often used for each page. The problem arises when that content is not sufficiently organized on each page, which results in a large number of pages that, apart from a short description of the product, contain exactly the same text.

Why prevent duplicate content on the site?

For one thing, duplicate content can hurt a site’s ranking. If search engines do not know which page to favor in search results, any pages that search engines see as duplicates will be at risk of being ranked lower.

Duplicate content will hurt your rankings. At the very least, search engines won’t know which page to suggest to users. And as a result, any pages that those search engines see as duplicates are at risk of being ranked lower.

So if you want your content to rank, it’s really important to make sure that each page offers a decent amount of unique content.

How to solve the problem?

When URLs must remain accessible to visitors, you cannot use a redirect, but you can use the canonical URL or the no index metatag in robots.txt, which tells search engines not to index the page.

Choose carefully how you will deal with the problem of duplicate content, as they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

There are numerous reasons for the creation of duplicate content, and most of them are of a technical nature. In one of the following texts we will deal with this side of technical SEO.

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