Duplicate Content
What is duplicate content? Duplicate content occurs when there is the exact same (or very similar) content appearing in multiple places on a website.
There are several SEO issues that can occur when a website has duplicate content, including crawl budget issues, search engine indexing issues, index bloat, keyword cannibalization, and canonical tag issues.
Our SEO Office Hours recaps below compile best practices Google has recommended for websites dealing with duplicate content issues.
(See Lumar’s full guide to duplicate content for even more actionable tips on how SEOs can address duplicate content issues.)
For even more on website content best practices for SEO, read our Guide to Optimizing Website Content for Search — or explore our Website Intelligence Academy resources on SEO & Content.
Duplicate Content Makes Large Sites Harder to Crawl
For large websites, duplicate content makes it harder to crawl.
Duplicate Pages with a Noindex May Be Selected
If you have duplicate pages with the same content which aren’t canonicalised, but one of the pages has a noindex, then Google might pick the noindex version, and then that page will be noindexed even if there is an indexable duplicate.
It’s OK to Use Shared Product Descriptions
It’s OK to use product descriptions which are shared with other websites. It can help to differentiate yourself if you can include additional information not available anywhere else, including customer reviews/comments.
URL Issues Create Duplicate Pages
Duplicate URLs from inconsistent ordering, case inconstistency, and session IDs can be fixed with canonical tags if the issue is minor, but it still creates crawling issues if there are many instances.
Search Console Reports Canonicalised Pages with Duplicate Titles
Search Console will report pages as having duplicate titles, even if they have been canonicalised
Any Unique Content on a Page Prevents Duplication
Google can detect any unique content on a page, even between duplicate content, and this can help it to rank in place of the duplicates, for longer tail search terms if there is additional detail that matches the unique content.