Practical Ecommerce Merchant

Jan. 8, 2025

SEO: Duplicate content

How Google Detects Duplicate Content

The myth of a duplicate content penalty has existed for years. Google seeks diverse search results and must choose when two or more pages are the same or similar, resulting in the others losing organic traffic — different from a penalty.

Google’s “Search Central” blog includes a guide on ranking systems that describes deduplication:

Searches on Google may find thousands or even millions of matching web pages. Some of these may be very similar to each other. In such cases, our systems show only the most relevant results to avoid unhelpful duplication.

Yet the guide doesn’t specify how the deduplication system chooses a page. In my experience, duplication occurs in four ways.

When a site has similar product or category pages or syndicates content (knowingly or not), Google will likely show only one page in search results. It’s not a penalty, but it does dilute traffic among the identical pages. Thus, ensure Google ranks the original, up-to-date, detailed, and relevant page (not a syndicated or scraped version).

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