What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate Content is content that already appears somewhere on your website or on a different website.



Duplicate content is chunks of content on your website that is the same or very similar to other content. Duplicate content can appear across your website, and/or across multiple websites.

A deceptive example of duplicate content would be creating multiple websites with the same content in an effort to rank for each website. A common, non-deceptive example of duplicate content is blog post excerpts appearing in multiple places such as the:

  • Original post
  • Home page
  • Search results
  • Blog archives

When search engines run across duplicate content, they generally only rank the most authoritative version. Additionally, duplicate content can be ranking factor to Google. If Google thinks content across your website is low quality, it might rank your website lower in ranking results. For these reasons, thinking through how search engines see your content is important.

In 2011, Google reinforced its commitment to high quality content when it rolled out a major search algorithm update called Google Panda, which pushed lower quality results down. This update affected 12% of all search results during the period of time it was released.

Minimizing Duplicate Content

Removing duplicate and light content or replacing it with unique, high quality content can increase how high your website ranks in search results. You can also use redirects and the canonical link element to inform Google which content you want treated as the original within your website.

Try using a tools such as Site Auditor to see if duplicate content appears across your website.

Duplicate Content Resources