What is duplicate content in SEO? How can it affect your visibility on the web, and what precautions should you take?

In the world of natural referencing, “duplicated content” means the repetition of the same textual information on several different Internet addresses… These repetitions may be either perfectly identical or slightly modified (known as “near duplicate content”).

This duplication occurs both within a single site (intra-site) and between different sites (inter-site). The reasons vary: a simple technical error for the former; ill-intentioned borrowing or simply the authorised reproduction of a text for the latter. It should be noted, however, that some external duplications are harmless and even normal – think of quotations…

Of course, falling into the trap of duplicate content doesn’t necessarily spell doom for your digital platform. However, it does pose a significant risk to the ranking of your pages in search results. What exactly are the problems involved? And how can you spot these undesirable duplicates lurking here and there? Let’s continue our exploration together…

Does duplicate content have an impact on SEO?

Google says no, no direct penalties… The redundancy of online information is a fact (more than a quarter of the web is affected)… But let’s make no mistake: it does influence visibility in the SERPs.

Identical content?

When it comes to choosing a page from among so many similar ones, search engines aim to serve the web user first and foremost. They therefore favour a version of the content that is repeated. How do they choose? The mystery remains, but we can assume that certain factors are decisive:

• Who published first?
• Which page attracts the most backlinks?
• From which domain does this famous “chosen page” come from?

Google is laying its cards on the table when it comes to duplicates: no explicit penalty is applied to offending sites… However (and therein lies the nuance), if a site seems to be playing with the rules to its advantage (“cheating”, some would say), then… the Mountain View firm gives itself the right to impose a penalty.

Internal duplicate content

Duplicate content is often the result of configuration errors, leading to identical texts appearing under different URLs. These errors are not always visible… Yet they can have a detrimental effect on a site’s search engine ranking.

On closer examination, this repetition of content weakens the strength of the pages. If, for example, an article on your site goes viral and accumulates inbound links (a boon for SEO, you might say), the risk is that these links will lead to clones of the same URL, thereby dispersing the authority received. The page thus loses what could have been a significant asset in the eyes of Google’s algorithms.

Duplicate content also wastes the crawl budget allocated by Google. Remember that the web giant’s robots have a limited amount of time to scan and index the pages on a site. Their principle is simple: one page equals one URL… So a multitude of URLs for similar content leads to repeated crawls as if they were new pages. If your platform contains too much similar content, these robots will find it harder to spend time scanning pages that may be more important for your online visibility.

To track down duplicates on your site, nothing beats a good crawl with SEO Spider from Screamingfrog. This utility simulates search engines and detects duplicates that could harm your SEO.

External duplicate content

Content is duplicated, sometimes legitimately… Sometimes not. There is a clear distinction between authorised sharing and illegal copying. When a quotation is inserted into a text (with the author’s agreement), it should be accompanied by a link to the original source. It is advisable to use a canonical URL to avoid any confusion…

An authoritative site can be copied without any noticeable loss of visibility. However, if a powerful competitor copies your content, expect Google to give them priority… Your work may then go unnoticed, as if it were theirs.

If you suspect that other sites are borrowing your texts, start simply: a Google search with extracts “in inverted commas” can reveal a lot. For small sites, this manual method may suffice.

But what about sites that manage hundreds of pages? Forget manual searching, it’s too time-consuming. Instead, use solutions like Duplichecker or Copyleaks… Both are designed to find plagiarism hidden on the web, efficiently and without hassle.