Duplicate content: why it’s not as big an issue as you might think
James Pruden
Managing Director at Xigen, Business Investor, Digital Expert & Entrepreneur.
There are a few words and phrases that are guaranteed to send marketing teams into a complete and utter tailspin.
Another sentence that’s known to strike fear into the hearts of digital marketers?
‘We’ve got duplicate content on our website.’
This might sound scary, and some marketers think this can lead to Google banning their website for life. However, it’s not as big a deal as you think and is pretty easy to resolve.
Let’s look at why duplicate content isn’t something to run away screaming from.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is identical (or highly similar) content that appears in more than one place on a website.
This type of content is not as uncommon as you think – ?three out of ten websites have some duplicate content on them!
When you have a lot of pages on your site, you might double up on content to save time. For example, using the same meta descriptions and page titles or the same boilerplate content on your product pages.
Technical issues can play a part in the creation of duplicate content too. If you use both HTTP and HTTP protocols, this may mean two versions of the same website are in play.
What happens if you have duplicate content on your website?
Duplicate content generally doesn’t cause any issues for the people who access your website. However, it can confuse the search engines.
Search engines like Google prefer not to show duplicate content if they can avoid it. This means if they identify duplicate content, they have to decide which version is the original and the one they will signpost searchers towards.
The search engines use a range of factors to identify the original piece of content, including page authority, number of internal links, and user engagement. This usually works, but there are some circumstances where the search engines get it wrong. This means they may show a page you weren’t expecting them to show.
So, duplicate content can be annoying, but your content will still rank in the search engine results. John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, has gone on record to say that duplicate content across most websites is perfectly normal and is not a negative ranking factor.
Can a website get banned from Google for having duplicate content? Yes, but this is very unlikely. A website would probably only get restricted if it was maliciously stealing other websites’ content on a mass scale.
And in that scenario, that site will probably be highly spammy and low-quality anyway, so no big loss.
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How do you know if you have duplicate content on your website?
There are lots of great tools you can use to identify any duplicate content on your site, especially if you have many pages to go through. Here are some of my favourites:
What’s the best way to fix duplicate content?
If it’s possible to do so, I recommend getting rid of duplicate content. This can improve the user experience and help increase your conversion rates.
Take duplicate page titles and meta descriptions, for example. Page titles and meta descriptions are a great way to entice people to visit your website in the search engines. This means it’s worth ensuring they’re unique for each page on your site.
However, there will be circumstances where duplicate content is unavoidable. For example, let’s say you’ve got an eCommerce store with lots of filtering options – there may be millions of combinations, and you can’t create unique page content for them all.
Enter the canonical tag.
A canonical tag is a piece of code you use to tell the search engines which version of a duplicated page is the original. You use them on the pages that you want to redirect the search engines from, as well as on the master page (this is called a ‘self-referential canonical tag’).
You can add this code to the HTML of your pages, or there are extensions that can do the hard work for you – you can add canonical tags easily into WordPress with the RankMath and Yoast plugins. On Shopify, you can add them directly through the admin panel.
One small caveat: it’s important to remember that the search engines see canonical tags as a suggestion rather than the law. This means they can override a canonical tag if they don’t believe it points to the original page.
In conclusion: duplicate content is nothing to be scared of
If you run an eCommerce store, it’s highly likely that you’ll have duplicate content on your site.
The good news? It won’t cause significant SEO issues to your site, despite what the naysayers say.
The better news? You can use canonical tags to signpost the search engines towards your preferred version of the content.
Want to keep the search engines, as well as your customers, happy? Technical SEO is the key. If you don’t know your canonical tag from your core web vitals, my expert team of SEO specialists can help. Drop me a DM, and let’s talk.