Publishing original content to your website is, of course, critical for building your audience and boosting your SEO.
The benefits of unique and original content are twofold:
- Original content delivers a superior user experience.
- Original content helps ensure that search engines aren’t forced to choose between multiple pages of yours that have the same content.
However, when content is duplicated either accidentally or on purpose, search engines will not be duped and may penalize a site with lower search rankings accordingly. Unfortunately, many businesses often publish repeated content without being aware that they’re doing so. This is why auditing your site[1] with a duplicate content checker is so valuable in helping sites to recognize and replace such content as necessary.
This article will help you better understand what is considered duplicate content, and steps you can take to make sure it doesn’t hamper your SEO efforts.
How does Google define “duplicate content”?
Duplicate content is described by Google[2] as content “within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar”. Content fitting this description can be repeated either on more than one page within your site, or across different websites. Common places where this duplicate content might be hiding include duplicated copy across landing pages or blog posts, or harder-to-detect areas such as meta descriptions that are repeated in a webpage’s code. Duplicate content[3] can be produced erroneously in a number of ways, from simply reposting existing content by mistake to allowing the same page content to be accessible via multiple URLs.
When visitors come to your page and begin reading what seems to be newly posted content only to realize