What is duplicate content in Google's eyes?
Google is a big company and they know their stuff. They also have a lot of money to invest on the experts who create algorithms for this service. And one of these experts, Kenichi Suzuki, said that 60% of the internet is duplicated in some way. Most likely, Google will use these duplicate pieces of information to rank articles higher than ones that haven't been seen before by those searchers.
This means, your duplicate content could be taken down from the search results.
This is not something Google wants to do of course. They are a very careful company and they want you to keep up the good work, delivering on their requirements, and always improving your site so that you will rank better for the search queries you want to appear in.
But Google is getting tougher on this rule. And this is why I have written this article: because I've seen many times people saying "I've not written duplicate content. Google hates me!" or "Google doesn't like me! I'm going to get kicked out." We need to be clear about this.
What is duplicate content?
Let's look at what duplicate content is and how it affects your website. Duplicate content doesn't mean that the same sentence is in two locations on your website. It means that the same information, the same words are used in different pages of your site.
The Google Search Console identifies duplicate content issues in two ways:
When crawling your website they look for identical markup on different pages and this is called structural similarity.
When they crawl your website they also check for duplicate content in the search results.
Of course, Google doesn't like duplicate content on your site because it confuses their users and it tells them that the information you are giving is not unique. The user could have ended up on one of your pages by searching for something and when they arrives there they could see that the same information is available in other places too. Why should I keep going with this current page? Maybe other pages have more valuable information in them.
I have ran at least over 1,000 website audits and almost every site has some type of duplicate content. Most times it is duplicate meta data because someone copied a page and didn't update the meta data on the new page. It's very easy to fix but you need to know that it's there.
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