In SEO, duplicate content refers to identical or nearly identical content that appears on multiple URLs, either within the same website or on different ones, which can confuse search engines and negatively affect rankings. The duplicate content feature is available for advanced Siteimprove SEO users. Use machine learning to discover the similarity of the content on your website. Duplicate content refers to page content that is very similar to the content of another page on your website or to duplicates of the same.
Siteimprove presents the pages found with duplicate content, the percentage of similarity between the pages and the statistics of page visits. Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place. That “single place” is defined as a location with a unique website address (), so if the same content appears on more than one web address, you have duplicate content. Duplicate content is material that appears the same way in two or more different places. It can arise for a variety of reasons.
For example, poor site architecture (where a site accidentally creates multiple copies of certain pages) can generate identical content. If a spam site copies content from another website, it can also generate multiple versions of a page. Noun blocks of content within or across domains that completely match other content or that are considerably similar. For the most part, this has no misleading origin.
When search engines find multiple versions of the same content, they can struggle to determine which version is the most relevant and trustworthy. Because more than one URL shows the same content, search engines don't know which URL to include higher in search results. A canonical link is a way of telling Google a preferred URL to be indexed when several pages have the same content or a similar one. If both versions of a page are active and visible to search engines, you may encounter a duplicate content issue.
The use of a canonical self-referenced tag on a page means that it is the original and reliable source, which helps to protect the content against search errors and to ensure its correct recognition by search engines. Google Search Console (GSC) offers a free way to identify duplicate content issues through its indexing reports. Whether or not you agree with the famous and grumpy American author, original content is something that worries many website owners and SEOs. As a reader, you may not care if you keep getting the answer you were looking for, but a search engine has to choose which page to show in the search results because, of course, it doesn't want to show the same content twice.
The Google Search Console index coverage report is also useful when it comes to finding duplicate content on your site. Duplicate content from a site is no reason to take action on that site, unless it appears that the duplicate content is intended to deceive and manipulate search engine results. Yes, because by correcting duplicate content issues, it tells search engines which pages they should actually crawl, index and rank. As these pages are very similar, they produce duplicate content if they are indexed by search engines.
More information refers to very similar, or exactly the same, content found on several pages of your own website or on other websites. In many cases, the best way to correct duplicate content is to implement 301 redirects from non-preferred versions of URLs to preferred versions.
