Why is duplicate content on your website bad?

The term ‘duplicate content’ refers to chunks of content which are either completely identical to one another (exact duplicates) or are very similar. (The latter category is known as common or near-duplicates.) The term ‘near-duplicate content’ refers to two pieces of content that only have only minor differences between them. There are certain situations where having some similar content is natural and unavoidable, as is the case with quoting another article that is found on the Internet.

The types of duplicate content

There are two types of duplicate content which are found on the Internet these days. These are the following:

Internal duplicate content

Internal duplicate content occurs when one domain creates duplicate content through multiple internal URLs on the same website.

A lot of the time, online shops have to manage duplicate content. Here is a case that occurs very commonly. The product detail pages can also be accessed without the necessity of having the related category or product page in the address of the web page:

• http://www.onlineshop-domain.com/category/productpage/productdetailpage, and
• http://www.onlineshop-domain.com/productdetailpage.

It is a common occurrence that those pages would then be indexed by search engines and both URLs are linked to externally. Another reason for internal duplicate content occurring can be an inconsistent internal link strategy.

External duplicate content

Another name for ‘external duplicate content’ is ‘cross-domain duplicates’. This occurs when two or more domains, which are different, have the same page copy that is indexed by the search engines.

Many websites can be accessed by using a number of domain names. There is nothing that is incorrect with this practice if all other domain versions are redirected to the corresponding main domain by using a 301-redirect.

If this does not happen, Google is see that there are different domains which all have the same content. This makes it difficult for Google-Bot to determine the relevancy of each individual page, which can lead to ranking challenges for the website.

Examples of duplicate content

Quoting from another source is fine. If this source is another web page, link back to that site in order for the website owner to get additional value from you quoting them. The more backlinks that a website has, the better it is for their SEO.

Replicating chunks of text verbatim, without the addition of any other value,  won’t benefit your users. Rather steer clear of this practice as it will harm your SEO and will turn your readers away from your site.

Here are some examples of duplicates which are seen often:

• Specifications in product descriptions.
• Products appearing in more than one category on your e-commerce website.
• Pages of content which appear in two places on your website (for businesses or consumers, for example).
• Using another website’s content openly (press releases or feeds for local events, for example).

Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?

There are a number several reasons why duplicate content is harmful to the SEO health of your website.

Duplicate content can present three main challenges for search engines:

• Search engines – such as Google and Bing – don’t know which version(s) to include or exclude from their indexes.
• They don’t know if they need to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to one page or, alternatively, keep it separated between multiple versions.
• Search engines don’t know which version(s) they need to rank for search results.

When duplicate content is present, website owners can be subjected to ranking and traffic losses. These two often stem from one of the following main problems:

• To offer users the best search experience possible, search engines will not often show multiple versions of the same content. This means that they are forced to select which version is most likely to deliver the best result. This minimises the visibility of each of the duplicates.
• Link equity can be further weakened as other sites have to also make a choice between the duplicates. As opposed to all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, these link to multiple pieces. This spreads the link equity among the duplicates. Owing to the fact that inbound links are a ranking factor, this can then impact the search visibility of a piece of content.

As people use Google, these days, as a means to find what they are looking for, it’s vital that your website gets found on the Internet. This means that you must do everything in your power to make sure that nothing on your website harms this.

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