I once carried out a site audit for a large, information heavy website. The site wasn’t getting as many visitors through search engines as they’d hoped, and so I was carrying out a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) analysis to help spot the issues that were holding it back.

I soon discovered that, due to a quirk of how it had been built, most of the content pages on the site were being duplicated. If you took these duplicate pages away, the site was about a third of the size.

Having duplicate content and is generally seen as bad for websites. While Google doesn’t directly punish you for repeating the same content across the site, it can harm how well your site will rank in search engine results. There are several reasons for this.

Republishing content that has already appeared on another site

One duplicate content problem arises when a website republishes content that first appeared on another website.

Some low-quality, spam sites scrape (the automated extraction of data) content from other websites without permission and republish them. Sometimes the content is slightly changed, for example by changing links to promote other websites.

This practice has long been frowned upon by search engines. Sites that copy content from other sites too much are seen as less trustworthy, resulting in lower ranking. There are however legitimate reasons to sometimes republish content. If this isn’t done too often, this won’t cause a problem, but if this is something your site needs to do regularly, then applying the correct metadata tags (e.g., ‘noindex’ or ‘canonical’) can prevent any trust issues.

The same page with more than one URL

Another complication can occur when the same webpage can be accessed by slightly different URLs, often due to the technical set-up.

This can confuse search engines, as they won’t know which page is the ‘master’, resulting in lower rankings for all versions on the content. This can usually be fixed on modern websites using tools such as redirects and metatags tags. This will require some technical skills to implement though.

Internal competition for the same keywords

While the last issue is becoming less of a problem for modern sites, it’s still very common to see similar content within the same site creating internal competition.

For example, if a website has two pages titled ‘Health and safety’ with comparable, if not fully identical content, this can result in less visits through search. Google sees two pages about ‘Health and safety’ and is unsure which is the authoritative version.

Having a single, master landing page on the subject will make it more likely to compete effectively against other sites with the same keywords. For this reason, it really helps to understand the content when designing the site structure.

If you’re looking to improve the number of visits coming to your website, be aware of the pitfalls of duplicate content.