Duplicate Content: What You Need to Know and How to Deal with It

We often hear about duplicate content and how Google penalizes you for it. However, there is more to it than web plagiarism and search engine sanctions.

Read below about what you need to know about duplicate content and how to deal with it:

1. Detecting Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is content that appears online in more than one place. In short, if your content is seen on more than one website, you’ve got duplicate content.  It can also be used to determine greater content issues like thin content, spam, or ‘scraped’ (stolen) content.

Duplicate content is not a penalty imposed by Google. Rather, it filters out content.

Google advises website owners to create high-quality, original content to avoid being flagged because of thin content.

2. Internal Duplicate Content

Sometimes, it is inevitable for website owners to have duplicate content across different web pages of their own website. It is not for the lack of ideas, but rather signifies structural issues within the website.

Having duplicate web pages confuses search engines like Google, whose purpose is to get a grasp of what your business stands for and what you have to offer. Another potential issue would be lack of original content on your own website, which you need to sort out within your team.

Google wants original content shown in SERP to provide good user experience, which means they don’t want online visitors to reach the same content repeatedly. In this instance, Google’s job is to determine which non-unique pages to display and which ones to hide.

The more original content you have on your web pages, the higher the chances that they appear on Google using various search queries.

3. Checking Duplicate Content

Use your SEO software to check your website for any internal duplicate content.

4. Ranking and Filtering Duplicate Content

Google selects non-original URLs to rank and which ones to filter out by choosing the more authoritative posts based on backlinks and other important SEO signals. In situations where Google finds two or more pages with identical URLs, they usually favor the one with the shorter URL.

5. International Websites: Translated Content as Duplicate Content

Never use automated translation tools like Google Translate as they render poor translation work and, at worse, you run the risk of having your content marked as spam.

Commission legitimate translators to perform translation jobs for you.

Another way to deal with duplicate content is to use the hreflang attribute to direct Google to the actual language you are using on a regional version of your website.

6. Duplicate Content across Localized Domains

There are two ways to fix different versions of your website across various localized domains:

• Use local jargon, history, traditions, and culture, if possible
• Select the region or country you want to concentrate on within the Google Search Console for all localized domains except, .com.