Duplicated content on your website.

Duplicate and duplicated content is a hotly debated topic on the web. Quite often it relates to how and whether it would affect website’s ranking with Google. For the most part, these concerns are unfounded as Google typically ignores the duplicate content.

 

However there are a number of other issues caused by the content duplication that are worth discussing.

 

– If content is duplicated within your website, it’s guaranteed to waste some of your crawl budget (aka the number of your pages search engines crawl per unit of time). This will cause the important pages on your site to be indexed less often. 

 

– By duplicating the content both internally and externally, you will be diluting the link juice. 

Over time URLs would build up backlinks, and unless one of them has a canonical link (or a 301 redirect) pointing to the original piece, you will have a number of pages with lower ranks instead of having a single page with a high rank.

 

– When Google finds duplicated content, it would typically show only one instance in response to search queries — and there is no guarantee it would what you want to rank.

 

It is not all doom and gloom however, all of these issues are preventable if you know where duplicate content may hide, how to detect it, and how to deal with it.