Looking to learn what duplicate content is, and how it might be hurting your SEO? is a source of constant anxiety for many site owners. Read almost anything about it, and you’ll come away believing that your site is a ticking time bomb of issues. A Google penalty is merely days away. Thankfully, this isn’t true—but can still cause SEO issues. And with 25-30% of the web being , it’s useful to know how to avoid and fix such issues. In this guide, you’ll learn: Before you panic, know that this isn’t always a problem because of how Google handles . In simple terms, when they detect they group the URLs into one cluster.
They then select what
Think is the ‘best’ URL to represent the cluster in search results” and “consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the company data representative URL.” This process is known as canonicalization. So, in the case above, Google should show only one of the URLs in organic search and attribute all referring domains in the cluster (106+144) to that URL. But that’s not what happens, as we see both URLs ranking in Google for similar keywords. Google finds new content on your website via crawling, which means they follow links from existing pages to new pages. They also recrawl pages they know about from time to time to see if anything has changed. Having duplicate content serves only to create more work for them. That can affect the speed and frequency at which they crawl your new or updated pages.
That’s bad because
It may lead to delays in indexing new pages and reindexing updated pages. SIDENOTE. Because Google’s “crawl rate limit” is higher for more responsive IS Lists websites, this is more of an issue for slow websites with smaller bandwidth allowances. Their systems will also crawl the duplicate URLs less often. 4. Scraped content outranking you Occasionally, you may permit another website to republish your content. That’s known as syndication. Other times, sites may scrape your content and republish it without permission. Both of these scenarios lead to duplicate content across multiple domains, but they usually don’t cause problems.
