Is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?

Steps you can take to address duplicate content issues

Is duplicate content bad for SEO? Google claims there is NO duplicate content penalty, yet rankings can be impacted negatively by what looks like “duplicate content” problems.

• What is duplicate content?
• Is there a penelty for duplicate content?
• How to address duplicate content

What is duplicate content?
Here’s Google’s definition: “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

Is there a penalty for duplicate content?
Google claims there is NO duplicate content penalty, yet rankings can be impacted negatively by what looks like “duplicate content” problems.

“In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we'll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”

Steps you can take to address duplicate content issues:

• Use permanent 301 redirects.301 redirects tell search engine spiders that the page has moved permanently, so they will remove the old URL from their index and replace it with the new.

• Use top-level domains for multi-regional sites: Use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. Google is more likely to know that http://www.example.eu contains European-focused content, versus knowing that for http://www.example.com/eu or http://eu.example.com.

• Minimize boilerplate repetition: If you have multiple pages with lengthy copyright text on the bottom, you could include a brief summary and then link to one copyright page that has all of the details.

• Minimize similar content: If you have multiple pages with similar content, you should consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one.

Here's the full article from Google on duplicate content

Learn more about SEO best practices to make it easy for people to find your website through search engines.