Duplicate content confuses Google and forces the search engine to choose which of the identical pages should rank in the top results. Regardless of who produced the content, there is a good chance that the original page is not the one chosen for the first search results. While not technically a penalty, duplicate content can sometimes affect search engine rankings. When there are several pieces of substantially similar content, as Google calls it, in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is most relevant to a given search query.
Duplicate content will hurt your ranking. At a minimum, search engines won't know which page to suggest to users. And as a result, all pages that search engines see as duplicates are at risk of being ranked lower. If your duplicate content issues are very serious, for example, if you have very thin content combined with copied content word for word, you could even face manual action by Google for trying to trick users.
So if you want your content to rank, it's very important that you make sure that each page offers a decent amount of unique content. Duplicate content can cause serious SEO problems and send mixed signals to search engines. Take appropriate measures to ensure that your content has unique URLs, so that each page has the best chance of ranking well and driving traffic to your site. Because these pages are very similar, they produce duplicate content if they are indexed by search engines.
After all, you've probably heard horror stories about how search engines like Google punish websites if they duplicate both a title or a phrase. Duplicate content means that similar content appears in multiple locations (URLs) on the web, and as a result, search engines don't know which URL to display in search results. The only problem you face with duplicate content is that, even if your site initially published it, other websites that have blindly copied the content may appear in the result of related search queries. While Google tries to find the original source of the content to appear in search results, blocking access to duplicate content could hinder the search engine's ability to crawl all versions and filter the best results.
In fact, most people who spread these rumors have little (if any) understanding of what duplicate content means and how it affects your SEO. Whenever the content of a site can be found in multiple URLs, it must be canonicalized for search engines. If your site contains several pages with almost identical content, there are several ways to indicate your preferred URL to Google. According to him, Google doesn't consider duplicate content as spam, and it doesn't lead to your site being penalized unless it intends to manipulate search results.
However, it's worth minimizing the amount of duplicate content you use, or at least trying to mitigate its impact on your website's SEO or ranking. If both versions of a page are active and visible to search engines, you may encounter a duplicate content issue. When your content is accessible in both www and non-www versions, the search engine will consider it as duplicate content. While Google penalizes blatant duplication of content aimed at playing with the system, no typical form of content duplication conflicts with search engine guidelines.
To offer the best search experience, search engines rarely display multiple versions of the same content and are therefore forced to choose which version is most likely to be the best result. .
