Duplicate Content: What It Is and How to Avoid It

Table of contents:

• What is duplicate content?
  • External duplicates
  • Internal duplicates
• Why can duplicated content hurt your website?
• How do you eliminate duplicate content?
• Summary

One of the most important rules of website SEO is to create unique content. That means valuable websites have no room for copied text - what's known as duplicate content. In this article, we explain what consequences duplicate content has for SEO and UX, how to avoid this mistake, and how to fix it.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content means repeating the same text across different websites, or in several places within a single site. So if the same content appears under different URLs, we're talking about duplicate content, which can hurt a site's visibility.

Based on where the duplicated content sits, we distinguish two types of duplicates:

External duplicates

Identical content that appears on different websites. It's worth noting that duplicate content doesn't always mean the text is simply doubled. Sometimes the exact same text appears on several, even a dozen or more, sites. This is the bane of online store owners' existence. After all, the same products are available on many different sites and marketplaces. Descriptions are sometimes copied straight from the manufacturer's site, and other times "pulled" into an online store from Allegro. That's how one description ends up under many different URLs.

If several different addresses lead to the same page, duplicate content also appears. The same goes for a separate language version where Polish text fragments have mistakenly been duplicated.

Another cause of external duplicates is publishing identical text both on your own site and on social media or in business directories.

Internal duplicates

Identical content published on several different subpages within the same site. These also come up often in online stores.

Even if you avoid external duplicates and write your own unique product descriptions, you can unintentionally duplicate text in several places on your own site. This happens, for example, when a given product appears both in one of the categories and in the "Promotions" tab. These are two different places on the site with different URLs, but they carry the same content.

The same goes for adding the same description to several products that differ only in minor details. For example: you add the products "Black sofa bed" and "Dark green sofa bed." Two different URLs are created, but both share the same product description - in other words, duplicated content.

Another type of internal duplicate we often see is customer information copied into an "FAQ" section from elsewhere on the site.

Why can duplicated content hurt your website?

Google's crawlers usually can't tell who authored the original content or under which URL it first appeared. Still, when a search engine encounters the same content on different sites or subpages, confusion arises. At that point, it makes a selection, so that for a given search query it surfaces certain pages, in a specific order. Which ones win?

The algorithm ultimately tries to pick the page that brings the most value to users and best answers a specific query. However, it factors in a huge number of variables in the process. What's more, sometimes it's a choice that's hard to agree with. So it's always worth betting on unique content, so your site isn't competing against its own "clones." If it's not the one the search engine picks, it will sit at distant positions in the rankings, or won't be visible at all. In that case, information about your products or services simply won't reach your audience.

Duplicate content isn't just an SEO issue. It also has a negative effect on UX, or user experience. Imagine you're looking for information about a product, service, company, place, or event. You land on a page, and once again see exactly the same content you've already seen under a different address. You probably won't remember that site as one worth coming back to. A site that doesn't deliver on UX also means lower conversion. That's exactly why unique content isn't created just for search engines, but above all for your audience.

Far more serious consequences await site owners who engage in deliberate manipulation and violate intellectual property. Copying someone else's text and claiming authorship for yourself is nothing other than plagiarism. Google can penalize such a site with sharp ranking drops, or remove it from the index entirely.

How do you eliminate duplicate content?

There can be many causes of duplicate content appearing. Fortunately, there are also several ways to deal with it.

Rewriting text

Try to create unique content for every page on your site, as well as different descriptions for external directories and social media profiles. Also avoid copying text from external sites.

If, however, your problem is repeating product descriptions, use rewriting. Apply a different sentence structure and different words in a way that preserves the original meaning. It might also help to change the order of specific pieces of information in the text. Remember to focus on the product's most important features and give your audience what will bring them the most value.

Canonical links

Large online stores sometimes have dozens, or even hundreds, of products that differ by just one or a few parameters. In that case, writing separate descriptions for each is nearly impossible. Here you can add a canonical link in the HTML code (rel="canonical"). This way, you tell the search engine which address is canonical - that is, the original and the most important one. Only that one chosen address ends up in the index, and the rest won't be indexed, so the search engine won't take into account the duplicates sitting on them.

Proper redirects

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. For users, the redirect may be unnoticeable, but for Google's crawlers it's an important signal that a given page has been permanently moved. It's especially useful after moving a site to a new domain, or if several different addresses lead to the homepage.

Proper CMS settings

Some content management systems (CMS) can contribute to creating duplicate content. They can automatically duplicate pages, or generate several URLs for a single article, or for a single product with multiple search filters, tags, or categories. It's important to understand how the system you use works and to make the necessary adjustments on an ongoing basis. If needed, fix your site's structure. It should have a clear hierarchy and a well-organized internal linking network.

Monitoring and optimization

If you want to check whether your site contains internal duplicates, or whether someone has copied your content, you can take manual action. Just copy a fragment of your text and paste it into a search engine. The search results will show every indexed address where that same content appears.

Besides manual checks, you can also reach for dedicated tools that catch duplicate content. These include Siteliner, which scans your entire website and identifies pages with identical or very similar content. In Google Search Console you can also check for duplicate meta tags. And Copyscape is a fairly precise tool for detecting external duplicates.

Summary

Avoiding duplicate content - in other words, creating unique text - not only supports SEO, but also has a major impact on UX, something many site owners forget. Remember that one-of-a-kind content isn't just something the algorithms demand - above all, it's what your audience expects when they're looking for valuable, interesting information.

By eliminating duplicate content, you can achieve not only better search results, but also greater user satisfaction, which in turn can lead to better conversion.