Duplicate content can cause big problems for your search engine rankings. The primary reason is because, if more than one page appears to have the same content, search engines can’t tell which page is the ‘real’ one.
Since they don’t want to list two sites with the same content in the results, what usually happens is that your pages lose ranking. This reduces traffic and the remaining visitors may even be split up between both pages instead of all going to one. While there’s no official ‘penalty’ for duplicate content, the net effect is diluted traffic and confused visitors.
Many website owners are surprised to learn that most duplicate content isn’t caused by spammers and plagiarizers. Some of it is, and you need to watch for that, but much of it comes from technical errors within your own website.
The good news is, if your site is suffering from duplicate content and your search engine rankings aren’t where they should be, there are specific steps you can take to fix it.
Here are seven ways your site can end up with duplicate content, and how to fix each one.
1. Copied content from other sites
First, let’s be clear. Plagiarism is a real crime. Copying content from another site (or offline source) and passing it off as your own is against copyright law.
But a lot of copied content isn’t done with malicious intent. Sometimes it’s just an honest mistake. You like something you’re reading on another site, and you want to use some of it in a blog post you’re writing. So you copy a couple paragraphs, put it in quotes, and figure you’re good to go.
Even if you link to the source of that content — which you absolutely must do — copying multiple paragraphs at a time may still look like duplicate content to search engines.
Solution
First, just don’t do it. Avoid copying large sections of content from other websites. If you want to quote another site, that’s fine. Put the text in quotes, include a link to the original, and try to keep the quote to no more than a sentence, or even part of a sentence.
Another approach is to just summarize the main idea expressed in the other article, and then still include a link to it because that’s the source material for what you’re writing. Links are the online version of those bibliographies you used to painstakingly compose back in middle school. Cite your sources.
Remember — your website is about you, your authority, your expertise, your experience. Thus, your content should reflect that. Other content should serve what you are trying to say. It should not be what you are saying.
What should you do if someone else copies your content?
You can use Google Search Console to find other sites that have copied your content, and ask them to remove it. Then, from now on, use self-referencing canonical tags for any new web pages, which tells search engines your page is the original source.
Not sure how to set up canonical tags on WordPress?
While you can code it into your page, you can also use a plugin like Yoast SEO (on WordPress.com plugin-enabled plans and higher). This plugin automatically sets up canonical tags for your URLs, but you can manually edit them any way you’d like.
2. Content that’s not unique enough
Sometimes, you may have multiple pages on your site with very similar content. This happens a lot with things like portfolio items. If you’re a construction company and you want to list all of the homes you’ve built, many of them could start to sound the same: “1,800 square Tudor in Austin, Texas.”
The same thing can happen with service pages, contact pages, and really anything that has common features. This is especially common with product pages. In many cases, items have very similar descriptions, with maybe just a new pattern or size. And if you buy products from a wholesaler, it may be tempting to just copy and paste descriptions from the manufacturer. But all of this can lead to duplicate content issues.
Solution
While it’s fine to include common features for each item — even if they aren’t very unique — try to write additional information about what makes each page special. For portfolio items, tell a quick story about the challenges the project faced or special requests the client had.
For products that are the same except for colors, sizes, or other simple attributes, try consolidating them into a single product with the ability for customers to choose between options. This is called a variable product.
For retail products purchased from a wholesaler, you may want to hire a copywriter to help you create new, unique descriptions that vary from the manufacturer’s.
Gathering and including testimonials is a great way to add unique content, too, and you don’t even have to do the writing!
3. Category pages
The next five causes of duplicate content are technical, caused by your own site or other backend technologies. So this is where you can really make some progress in removing almost all the duplicate content that may be diminishing your search traffic rankings.
When you create a blog post, you often give it a category. This serves your site’s visitors by helping them find more content on a particular topic.
The problem is, if you actually click on those category links, those are real web pages, too. They often have excerpts from the various posts that fall under that category. Those excerpts will thus be duplicated from the original pages.
On eCommerce sites, category pages are usually collections of products. In that case, you don’t want these pages to be invisible to search engines. But you also don’t want them to dilute traffic to your actual product pages. So, what can you do?
Solution
First, it’s good to add a little original copy (the advertising and publishing world’s term for “text”) at the start of each category page. This gives the page its own content and distinction for the search engines.
You may decide that some category pages are very similar to other category pages. In that case, remove the link for the first one and use a 301 redirect to the primary category.
It’s also possible that you might create a temporary category page that serves as a landing page for a marketing campaign. In that case, use nofollow and noindex tags so this page doesn’t interfere with the main category page’s traffic. Here’s a deeper exploration of the category-based duplicate content issue.
4. Blog post tags
Like categories, every time you use a tag, your site will create a separate page for that tag. Again — all the tags are clickable links.
This can really cause serious duplicate content issues. Why? Because in addition to the excerpts issue that happens with category pages, your tag pages may also be competing against your category pages for traffic, especially if the tag is the same or very similar to a category. Also, some tags are very similar to other tags, so the problem magnifies even more.
Solution
The simplest solution is to just stop using tags. But if you find tags valuable or think your readers appreciate them, then add a noindex tag to the HTML code for each tag page.
The noindex feature tells search engines to ignore this page so it won’t interfere with your traffic to the actual content pages.
The Yoast SEO plugin simplifies this process, with an option to quickly toggle indexing for tag pages.
5. Comment sections
Ah… comments. Engagement. Text you didn’t write that can also help your SEO. Comments are great.
Except that, if you paginate your comments and end up with a lot of them, you’ll have multiple pages with duplicate content.
Solution
This one is easy to fix. In the Settings → Discussion section of your WordPress dashboard, go find the setting that lets you “break comments into pages with XX top level comments per page…”
Uncheck that box, and now all your comments will remain on the main blog page. Problem solved.
6. URL Parameters (UTMs)
This cause of duplicate content is unknown to most typical website owners — meaning people who don’t spend their time thinking about code. But it can happen to just about any site.
You probably have some sort of tracking code on your site, monitoring your traffic, click rates, conversions, and so on. That’s good.
The problem is, some of this code generates a new URL for each page, with the exact same content. And all those duplicate pages can dilute your traffic. Semrush provides a great resource that explains more about this issue.
Solution
For this you can use a canonical tag. This tells search engines which post or page is the original, or at least the one that you want it to use for ranking and traffic.
7. Print-ready pages
Lastly, some sites like to create print-friendly versions of some of their pages. This is particularly common on sites that give their visitors directions on how to do something, such as recipes or activity guides.
Print-friendly pages are usually PDFs, and often have the exact same content, or very similar content, as the regular webpage they’re based on. But search engines can read PDFs, which means the print-friendly URL will be duplicate content.
Solution
Here, the solution is the same as the last one. Use canonical tags so the search engines will know that the print-friendly version is actually the same page, and all the traffic and ranking signals should go to the primary URL.
How do you know if your site has duplicate content?
There are several free tools available that can quickly determine if your site has duplicate content.
Siteliner looks for duplicate content on your own site. You just type in a URL and it will look for duplicate content related to that page. You could use this for a category page, for example, and see if any other category pages, blog posts, tag pages, landing pages, or other pages come up.
Copyscape works in a similar way, but it looks for duplicate content on other sites, external to yours. So this is where you would catch content thieves and other sites that have, for one reason or another, copied your content but not properly linked to your pages. You can also use it to confirm that your own content writers aren’t stealing content from other sites and getting you to pay for it.
SEOReviewTools has both an internal and an external duplicate content checker. You can input URLs or actual text from your pages.
And as Fast Comet explains, you can also use Google to search for specific words or phrases on your site.
To do that, type a version of the following text directly into the search bar: site:yoursite.com intitle:”keyword”
In place of ‘yoursite.com’, put in your actual website’s URL. And in place of ‘keyword’, put in the word or phrase you want to look up.
You’ll get a list of search results with every page using that word or phrase on your website. If you don’t get any duplicates, scroll to the bottom and click the link that says ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’. This might be necessary because, as you now know, Google may not show search results that have duplicate content.
Discovering and solving duplicate content issues is just one aspect of technical search engine optimization. But now that you understand how it may impact your site and the most common solutions available, it’s something you can work on yourself! Give it a try — it just might help you beat the competition.
You might also like: How to Split a Blog Post into Multiple Pages
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