Take a look at these two pages, for example:ī.uk/en-gb/clothing/shirts.html?new_style=Checkedī.uk/en-gb/clothing/shirts.html?Size=S&new_style=Checked This kind of navigation appends parameters to the end of the URL.īecause there are usually many combinations of these filters, faceted navigation often results in lots of duplicate-or-near-duplicate content. Faceted/filtered navigationįaceted navigation is where users can filter and sort items on the page. There’s no single cause of duplicate content. However, as discussed above, duplicate content can still hurt SEO-even without a penalty. Publishing affiliate content scraped from Amazon or other sites (and adding no additional value).Intentionally creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with lots of duplicate content.Google has a lot of information on that here. The question is, what counts as “intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users”? 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. 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. If your duplicate content is accidental and not the result of intentional manipulation of search results or spammy practices, then you won’t get penalized. Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst Googleīut, this isn’t entirely true. In this instance, Google likely isn’t consolidating “link equity” at one URL. So, in the case above, Google should show only one of the URLs in organic search and attribute all referring domains in the cluster (106+144) to that URL.īut that’s not what happens, as we see both URLs ranking in Google for similar keywords. They then “select what think is the ‘best’ URL to represent the cluster in search results” and “consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.” In simple terms, when they detect duplicate content, they group the URLs into one cluster. And they have 106 and 144 referring domains (links from unique websites), respectively.īefore you panic, know that this isn’t always a problem because of how Google handles duplicate content. resources/social-media-manager-checklist To show an example of this in the wild, take a look at these two pages on : That results in the splitting of “link equity” between URLs. If the same content is available at many URLs, then each of those URLs may attract backlinks. If that happens, an undesirable URL may take its place.īecause people may be less inclined to click on an unfriendly URL, you may get less organic traffic. The first should show up in search results, but Google can get this wrong. /page/?utm_content=buffer&utm_medium=social.Imagine that the same page is available at three different URLs: Undesirable or unfriendly URLs in search results

Scraped or syndicated content outranking you.Undesirable or unfriendly URLs in search results.Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?ĭuplicate content may harm your SEO performance for a few reasons. Google states that most duplicate content is not deceptive in origin. That would also be true if I were to republish it on another website. It can occur on a single website or cross-domain.įor example, if I were to republish this post at /blog/duplicate-content -copy/, then that would be duplicate content. Beginner’s guide to technical SEO What is duplicate content?ĭuplicate content is exact or near-duplicate content that appears on the web in more than one place.

Duplicacy issue