Top Tips To Control Website Content Duplication in 2024

Website content duplication is a website SEO issue that you have to control effectively.

Here are some tips as part of your Website SEO Strategy.

Check for duplicate content on your website that includes “Title, Description, and Keywords tags” on your website. You have to ensure the correct placement of “Title tag, Meta description tag, Meta keywords, and Meta tag” on the “Heading tag” in your HTML code on every page on your site, and these are all unique. Make website content deduplication one of your top priorities for your content development and SEO strategy. Any mishandled duplicate content will cause site owners to suffer rankings and site traffic losses. You can use any duplicate content checker and plagiarism checker online free such as CopyScape, SeoReviewTools, and a lot more. Ensure duplicate content check as well as a thorough check for the plagiarism of your website content, as well as your pulled-out (scraped) and syndicated content from high-authority domain sites.

Why does duplicate content on a website happen?

A “duplicate content” or website content duplication on a website occurs when a text on more than one page on your site appears, for reasons like the appearance of similar content, use of scraped or copied content, URL variations, the use of HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW versions of your sites, and other causes including those that are more unintentional. You need to determine these duplicate content issues on your website to ensure a smooth website SEO strategy, especially the search engines’ crawling to increase your website’s ranking, and content marketing. When your website rises through the search engine rankings, so is your business to benefit from the traffic it generates, the leads it drives to the site, and the conversion rates. Unknowingly, it may have created duplicate content along the way.

First, you have to differentiate a good website content to get rid of your website content duplication and make sure to check for plagiarism. Duplicate content is website content that appears on the internet in more than “one place” that is a location with a unique website address (URL). If this happens, you’ve got duplicate content. The same web content will be available on multiple URLs on the web once your web address has similar content that appears more than once in the same location, including third-party high-authority domains that you link your content to. When more than one URL shows the same content, then it will be difficult for search engines to know which URL to list higher in the search engine result pages or SERPs. You have to implement these tips to control duplicate content or website content duplication, as well as the use of any online SEO tools, plagiarism checker, and duplicate content checker. Should you have other SEO best practices that are not listed here, please include and customize your SEO strategy to control your website content duplication.

Most importantly, secure your website with open-source software or OSS dependencies to avoid duplicate content on your website amidst an increasing demand trend of internet use. These dependencies are third-party open-source packages that have to comply with OSS copyright notices and license obligations. According to WhiteSource, “the use of permissive OSS licenses is still on the rise, continuing the trend since 2018. Use these tips to control duplicate content on your website in sending signals to search engines to correctly rank your URLs and give preference to your website content pages that you intend to rank in the SERPs.

Take these tips to control duplicate content that can help you on your website SEO strategy:

1. Recognize and cluster duplicate web pages on your website.

You need to identify all near-duplicate and duplicate content on your website.

There are a lot of tools to identify duplicate content. You can use any online content duplication checker, such as CopyScape.com. It is easy to use, you have to insert a link in the box on the homepage, and CopyScape will return several results, similar to that of Google’s search engine result pages. People mistake duplicate content for a penalty because of how Google handles it, but it is not how it originally happened. These clusters of duplicate content cascade and are being filtered in the search results. Try to add “&filter=0” to the end of any of your URLs and remove the filtering to see it for yourself.
The occurrence of near-duplicates can increase the space required to store the index results by the SERPs, decreases search engine crawling of your website, and can irritate the users. You can use several capable near-duplicate content detection tools that are important to allow a smooth user query experience for duplicate contents and to filter out unnecessary information on your website and in the vast content on the internet when SERPs do the indexing.
You can also detect near-duplicate and duplicate content using the simplest and most logical method, by copying and entering a snippet of your content into Google search and see if any other page shows up with identical or duplicate content. Google does not penalize a website for duplicate content. Still, it does filter similar or identical content, which has the same impact as being penalized – a loss of rankings for your web pages. One of the many reasons duplicate content can severely impact your website SEO.
You can use Google Search Console to detect duplicate content, including those content that appears on a web page but can also appear in search snippets (i.e., meta titles, meta descriptions). The website content duplication can be detected easily via Google Search Console’s “HTML Improvements” under the Optimization option.
You can also make use of the “Site:” Search Operator. Just enter your website URL on search using the “site: search operator” along with part of the content from the page:

site:www.yoursite.com [enter a part of the content copied from your site here].

Once you see a message from Google saying about omitted results, it means your website has duplicate content present on it or outside of it.

Also, you can canonicalize each product/color URL with the same content but change the main product image even though this may not be enough to set a difference and set them apart. Should you canonicalize all similar content to one and consolidate duplicate content, you can rewrite the product name, description, etc. to keep each version separate and unique. When you combine pages with mostly similar or duplicate content, you can cluster your web pages, positively signal Google search engine crawling, and lead to higher performance.

2. Pick a representative URL, index unique pages.

Determine your preferred URLs to represent your website content as unique pages in the indexing of search engines. Define a canonical page as a representative URL of similar or duplicate pages. If you have a single page that is accessible by multiple URLs, or different web pages with duplicate content (i.e., a web page that has both mobile and desktop versions), Google search engine crawlers see these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often than those being canonicalized.

This is how Google works, and if you don’t explicitly tell the search engine crawlers which URL is the canonical version, Google will make a choice for you or might consider them both of equal weight. This may lead to unwanted behavior of search engines and may rank your website content low in the SERPs.When your website has pages with mostly similar or duplicate content, they can compete in the SERPs. Most likely, they would get filtered at query time, which each one of the pages filtered accumulates links that can go to waste. So, what if users or visitors specifically search for content that is only available in some of your web pages? This means it would not be wise to consolidate those duplicate content or URLs because your website would lose the relevant rankings it aims for. Hence, better forward or send these signals to your representative URLs or also known as canonicals, or make your redirects.

3. Forward signals to representative URLs (canonicals).

To effectively send or forward signals to representative URLs or canonicals, consider using a 301 rewrite rule in your htaccess file so that both addresses:

[https://example1.com and https://www.example1.com] can resolve to the same URL.

Start forwarding the signals by deciding which URL you want to define as your representative URL or canonical. You should pick your best-optimized URL as your canonical.

Place the rel=”canonical” annotation in the <head> of your page to properly indicate to search engines that the content is copied from your canonical URL. It should look like this:

Ensure you can handle non-canonical URLs as these pages (that are either a canonical duplicate of another URL or a duplicate piece of content) can link to from pages on your site, and can be accessed if they are mishandled with redirects. Check Google General guidelines for all canonicalization methods to follow in sending or forwarding signals to representative URLs or canonicals, including your syndicated contents with high-authority domain sites.

4. Be consistent with your website content to send a good signal to Google.

Ensure that your SEO is consistent in any content that exists on your website. That is when a content is found identical to other content that exists either on the same site or a different one like a third-party high-authority domain all considered inconsistencies of your website SEO content strategy. Therefore, it can become duplicate content. Do this by identifying what website content duplication is, and what is not.

a. Here are examples of duplicate content that you need to be aware of so you can control them effectively:

Blog content that is syndicated or copied on another high-authority domain.
A home page that has multiple URLs that provide similar content, i.e., , , and .
Web content or pages that have been duplicated due to session IDs and URL parameters, i.e., and .
Web content or pages and that have sorting options based on time, date, color, or other criteria, such as and .
Web content or pages with tracking codes and affiliate codes, such as and .
Printer-friendly pages created by your website CMS with similar content as your web pages have.
Web content or pages that are http before login and https after.

b. Differentiate the above-mentioned website content duplication examples to these non-duplicate content:

Quotes from other sites that are associated with a source link when used in moderation on your webpage inside quotation marks.
Your website images from other sites or images repeated on your website – this is not considered duplicate content as search engines cannot crawl images.
Infographics that are shared through embed codes.
Regular and stripped-down pages which forum discussions generate to target at mobile devices.
Multiple distinct URLs that show store items or links
Printer-only versions of web pages.

c. And when you syndicate your content to third-party high-authority domains, make sure to pay attention that these sites help avoid duplicate content issues with republishing your content. You need to add a “NoIndex tag,” and a tracking URL, update the content to make it different, and have the third-party publish it at the same time as the original piece of your site. There is also an excellent reason to pay attention to the links that the syndicated or scraped content takes. These links may pass little or no authority, but you may get the occasional referral visit.

5. Signals Google uses for duplicate content.

The following are indicators you can use to cope with controls you need for the website content duplication that is generated on your site:

a. Effective Redirects are the most important signal that Google gets.

Google mostly trusts redirects, as they are almost entirely predictive of website content duplication. This is part of why Google recommends using them when you move or redesign your site.

Use the 301 permanent redirects where necessary and possible. The use of 301 redirects is one of your handy resolutions on duplicate content or pages generated unintentionally. Meaning, they are not necessary for the user to see actually. So, adding rel=“canonical” tags to the duplicate pages can keep these pages visible to users while 301 redirects can only point both search engine bots, and users to the preferred page. You can do this specifically to your home page URLs, from the WWW URL to the non-WWW URL or vice versa, and depending on which URL is used mostly. Also, when you have duplicate content on multiple websites with different domain names, you can 301 redirect the pages to one URL. You have to note that 301 redirects are permanent, so please be careful when choosing your preferred URL.

b. High-Quality Content.

Google uses content checksums. To detect high-level errors, they use checksums and make efforts to ignore boilerplate and catch a lot of soft-error pages. You can minimize boilerplate repetition when you include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. This should be done instead of putting lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page to make it a strong content as a whole. You can use Google’s Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters. This is why Google prefers getting an http error instead. When in maintenance mode, use 500 instead of 200. Utilize Google Tools to optimize your website content and ensure to check for plagiarism. Go to Google Copyright Removal Page to report the website duplicate content issue if there is any.

So, when a user clicks the link to repeat the search, they encounter these missing duplicate-content pages. The chance of a user to click this link is nil as the message may show on the last search page, or how many pages a search may return. Additionally, when there is one version of the content on your website, why would you need to repeat one? This is one way that Google refines the user-experience of its search engine. There are many ways of handling your website content duplication, which the way Google handles duplicate content affecting your SEO and rankings:

Lose Your Original Content to Omitted Results, when you syndicate your original blog to various third-party websites without a backlink to your content, their content may likely omit or replace your original content. This syndicated-content omission or replacement is real, especially if the third-party site has a higher PageRank, higher influence, and higher-quality backlinks than your website.
Waste of Indexing Time for Bots, while they index your site. Search engine bots treat every link as unique and index the content on each of them on your website. Hence, when your website has duplicate links because of “session IDs,” or any of the reasons mentioned above. The bots then waste their time indexing repeat or duplicate content instead of indexing other unique content on your website.
URL parameters can cause duplicate content issues, which include user-click tracking, some analytics code, and other URL peripheries. When these scenarios happen, not the parameters themselves but the order that these parameters appear on the URL itself, this can be a problem that may send confusion to the search engines, such as this example: www.widgets.com/blue-widgets? Google was able to design algorithms that prevent duplicate content from affecting webmasters, which consolidates various versions into a cluster of URLs, subsequently displaying the “best” URL in the cluster. They actually consolidate these various signals (i.e., links) from pages within that cluster to the one being shown on the search engine results. When your website seems to have a lot of pages that may look like duplicate content apart from one or two items on the page, then you need to “fold those pages together” into one strong page.
Multiple Duplicate Links means to dilute “link juice,” when you build links that point to a page with numerous URLs and distribute the “passing of link juice” among them. Once all the pages consolidate into one, the link juice also consolidates. You can imagine your website content duplication like this, has a similar page that is available in three different URLs:

1st) domain.com/page/

2nd) domain.com/page/?utm_content=buffer&utm_medium=social

3rd) domain.com/category/page/

The first URL can show up in search results, but Google can get this wrong. When this scenario happens, an undesirable URL (2nd, or even the 3rd URL) may take its place. Mostly, people tend less likely to click on an unfriendly URL (2nd) but may choose a similar URL (3rd, a duplicate of the first URL) instead. Subsequently, when this scenario occurs, you may get less organic traffic and may confuse Google, placing your website indexing into the low priority or less frequent.

5. Organic Traffic Loss is when your content is not what the keyword the user searches for, or the content version that Google chooses to show in search results. When this happens, you will lose valuable organic traffic to your site.

Look at how keywords are being deployed in the page content than on how it can affect the signals that Google uses. You need to focus your primary (or main) keyword as well as your related keywords into your page content by using it on your meta description, SEO title tag, and article title. Use your keywords within the first and last 200 words of your content, and evenly spread these keywords on the entire article or page content. And ensure to include latent semantic indexing on your content keyword implementation so that search engines can discover how a term, a keyword, and content work together to harmonize the same content. Even in the absence of a few keywords or unable to share related keywords or synonyms to prevent duplicate content. Instead, make your content high-quality and relevant for search engine results, and to use the signals your web page content sends to Google or to match the user’s query search.

c. Use Rel=canonical

Adding a canonical tag to the preferred URL of the content on your website is what Google recommends for search engine bots to index a page, see the canonical tag, and get the link to the original resource. Also, all links to any duplicate page are counted as links to the source page.

They use annotations to a cluster of content tags and tend to get more search engine verification. Essentially, these canonical tags prevent duplicate content, especially on organic search engine results. These “Canonicals” mean the one true page out of potentially many duplicates on search engines, which are single-line HTML codes in the <head> section of your web page. Thresholds can still intentionally lose and have more than a few “broken script” clusters. When you use the canonical tag, you can prevent Google from penalizing you for website content duplication issues.

Use the rel=”canonical” link element on your pages wherever possible. When you use a content management system, syndicate your content (i.e., an e-commerce site), you can easily wind up multiple URLs or domains to point to the same content. To prevent this anyway, you can indicate to search engines where to find the original content using the rel=”canonical” tag or annotation. A search engine will know that the current page is a copy and where to find the canonical content correctly when they see this annotation. Better decide on your best-optimized URL URL to pick as the “canonical URL” to properly signal a search engine that the content is copied from your canonical URL. Place the rel=”canonical” annotation to look like:

For your non-HTML version of a document, you can include the canonical reference in the HTTP header like this:

<https://www.example1.com/document.html>”>; rel=”canonical”.

d. Meta Robots Tag

To signal Google of your high-quality content, you can also use the meta robots tag with nofollow, and noindex attributes when you see the need to keep a duplicate page from a search engine indexing. Add this code to the duplicate page:

Also, there is another way to exclude duplicate pages from the search engine indexes, and that is to “disallow the links” using special characters on the robots.txt file. When Google advises not to disallow pages based on duplicate content using robots.txt as it may block the URL altogether. There is a chance that the search engine bots may find the URLs outside of the website via these links. The search engine bots may treat these links as unique pages, the preferred page among all the duplicate content, despite your intention.

e. Use of hreflang

Use the hreflang tag to handle your content localization. Using a hashtag “#” instead of the question mark operator when using Urchin Tracking Module or UTM parameters is one best practice to prevent duplicate content. And be careful with your content syndication to avoid duplicate content and broken links. You can check it using Google Developer Tools to indicate to Google the use of hreflang for localized or region-specific language and the localized version of your pages.

The use of the Hreflang annotations aims to cross-reference similar content pages but enable the targeting of different audiences based on their language and, or country. In short, hreflang ensures the correct display of content and pages to the target or right users when they search the Google search version you are targeting. Though Hreflang helps Google recognize the country and language’s target of your page, it will not affect search engines’ decision of which version of your content is best suited for search query results.

Further, Hreflang helps Google to understand your website content. Still, you need to include link building to your site from relevant countries or languages that you intend to target to leverage the SEO added value of both your localized content or international versions.

f. Implement Content Localization.

When the main content is the same, page clustering and boilerplate can be done – only for content localization. Cleverly geo-redirect all your clusters and use hreflang alternates to bridge any gap within these clusters. The use of hreflang links significantly indicates Google helps your website localize its content. When you implement content localization, you need to link to local content. Meaning, you need to consider a few things so that search engines like Google and Bing can return the best localization results to your website.

Ensure that your website is geographically available as a local resource and that it is mobile-friendly. Make your website have fresh content and encourage ratings and reviews of your web page with high-quality content reflecting the local trends to satisfy Google’s local pack searches. This local pack is one of Google’s search results listings that show ads and local content to streamline searches and simplify organic listings. Check that your website content is linking to local content for an identified region. Search engine algorithms such as Google or Bing might decide to index a search query, for instance, a business located farther from your location may have what you’re looking for than a company that is closer to you. Hence, search engines will rank that distant business higher in local results instead.

6. Canonical Signals Google uses for website content duplication.

Hijacking is one of Google’s overriding concerns when it comes to website content duplication. Escalations via Wireless Telephony Application (WTA) forum that merge voice and data networks are valuable for Google search engines to index your website effectively. From this, the second concern for your website is “user experience.” So, keep reporting hijacking cases to the forum.
Another signal for Google is on Security, affected by a slow meta refresh that is a bad experience, expired SSL certificate is a bad experience too and if your secure page has insecure dependencies – another bad experience.
Webmaster signals, that include your Redirects, specifically 301, rel=canonical, meta robot tags, and sitemaps. Use redirects to indicate Google into your site redesign. Send Google meaningful HTML result codes – 301 are essential.
Keep “Canonical signals” simple and unambiguous. Don’t use 301 and rel=canonical on the same page! Always check your “rel=canonical” links that it could not get your canonicals wrong that can critically impact your search performance and can send wrong signals to Google.
Ensure to avoid these “common misapplications” of canonicalization:

Paginated content all pointing to page one – add the canonical annotation to paginated content, you need to match your page 1 URL to your canonical page 1 URL, page 2 to page 2, and so on.
Canonical URL that is not an exact match – happens when your site uses protocol-relative links, leaving off your http or https addresses to still result in search engines to consider “duplicate content at those two addresses.” So, always make your preferred URLs become the 100% exact match.
Tags are pointing to canonical URLs that return a 404 error – search engines will ignore tags that point to a dead page.

To send desirable canonical signals to google, you have to check the agreement of “web pages URLs with the canonical URLs” on your website. These canonical agreements will help ensure that the rel=canonical element or “canonical link” can avoid duplicate content issues from occurring on your site. When the canonical URL is in agreement, it sends signals to search engine crawlers of the preferred version of your webpages, the “canonical URL” or the source to improve your site’s SEO. Should there be canonical issues, evaluate and address it simply by deploying a permanent 301 redirect though this scenario may not be the case at all times. And depending on the server host of your website, you can determine the method you want to use in implementing a valid redirect to resolve website content duplication.

7. Secure your website OSS dependencies.

You need to secure dependencies on your website. Secure pages for open-source dependencies such as open-source software (OSS) include scripts (i.e., JavaScript), plugins, and other web applications. These third-party modules that, when get overlooked, involve a considerable amount of security risks to your website SEO and user experience. No matter how useful these third-party modules are for your domain, they can introduce some vulnerability risks to your website application. Modern day JavaScript, for example, which most developers love, is one of the open-source modules that add to website performance by providing additional functionalities for continuous use. Indeed, if not for these open-source packages, most of the frameworks today may not exist in their current form. These OSS dependencies can also help your website become a high-authority domain.

Do a Node Package Manager or NPM audit of your open-source dependencies to perform a moment-in-time security review of your website’s dependencies, such as your JavaScript programming language. When you have done an npm audit, you would know the information that is vital to your security vulnerabilities on your dependencies. The NPM audit can help you fix a vulnerability by providing simple-to-run npm commands and recommendations for further troubleshooting.
Ensure OSS Compliance for your full-fledged enterprise-level applications. The usual dependencies include direct, development, bundled, production, and optional dependencies. Everyone has the best benefit ripped out of these open-source website applications. It would help if you secured OSS compliance when you use these applications, though. OSS compliance, which users, integrators, and developers of these OSS packages observe copyright notices and license obligations for their OSS components to facilitate a practical use for commercial purposes. These are the Top OSS licenses ranked from the highest to the least according to risk: MIT License, Apache License 2.0, GNU General Public License (GPL) 3.0, GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0, and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) 3.0 License.
Secure your open sources and stay safe against vulnerabilities. Always track security updates for your open-source packages, especially your libraries, you can enforce security policies and have automated patch management, as well as make use of security tools to find and fix security vulnerabilities. Continuously find and fix vulnerabilities using Snyk.io, a developer-first solution to enable you to code securely, and run your website fast.

Conclusion

Generally, a website content duplication or duplicate content comprises substantive blocks of content within or across domains that can match other content or have the same content. Any website content duplication or website duplicate content can be a red flag to search engines. For instance, Google expects content to be unique or sourced correctly. For your website SEO to thrive in the search engine rankings, make sure to check for duplicate content issues. Especially when you pull content from another site to quickly get content up and running, or you syndicate your content to third-party high-authority domains, there is a high chance that your website can both send right or wrong signals to search engines like Google and get affected how they handle indexing of domains with duplicate content issues.

In some cases, your duplicate content may not be malicious or pose a threat to your website SEO performance, and as long as it adheres to the website content publishing protocols. These content publishing protocols are Google’s content policies that are critical to ensure a positive user and publishing experience over the internet. When Google finds your website content is violating these publishing policies, such infraction may cause Google to remove the same content from appearing on new platforms or browsers. And the repetitive infractions of your site to these content policies may cause a site to cease appearing on unique surfaces. There is always an exception to some rules, such as for online content publishing concerning artistic, educational, historical, documentary, or scientific considerations, and other substantial benefits the public can get from the internet.

Check for duplicate content or website content duplication, such as for a site like a directory listing or an e-commerce business that might have multiple versions of the same items. If this happens, you can indicate your preferred URL with canonicalization. And if you’re unsure how to do it correctly or how to handle unique cases like this effectively, we recommend you work with an SEO agency to guide you in removing website content duplication as well as on how to optimize or create a website with SEO value. Hoping that you can effectively identify what duplicate content on a website is, you have to control or avoid this content duplication to occur. At a glance, the following summary of the abovementioned tips to control duplicate content on your website can help you simplify your SEO strategy and add SEO value to your ranking with the SERPs:

Check for near-duplicate and duplicate content on your website, if there is any.
Do not create any website content duplication, if your site is already “duplicate content free.”
Redirect duplicate content to the canonical URL on your site.
Add a canonical link element to the duplicate page on your website.
Add an HTML link from the duplicate page to the canonical page.
Manage and customize your URLs that will not lead to a dead page or broken links.
Syndicate your original content to third-party high-authority domains with noIndex tag and tracking URL, and keep it updated. Ensure that your scraped or syndicated content does not outrank your website.
Make use of the rel=canonical tag to help your website inform Google not to filter your identical content, impede its search engine indexing of your website content, or penalize your site for duplicate content issues that can affect your SEO strategy from improving your website visibility.
Secure your website open-source software or OSS dependencies against vulnerabilities.
Adapt the aforementioned tips to control duplicate content as part of your website SEO strategy.

You can utilize these best website content deduplication practices, which is the simplest SEO Strategy to control website content duplication and customize it to your needs, or clients. When effectively done, you can prevent your website’s link authority from diminishing and, instead, boost your website page’s ability to rank in organic search engine results. Remember that Google would only penalize if your site has duplicate content to beat the system. By just merely having website content duplication would not result in Google’s action on your website, only when the intent of the duplicate content appears to be deceptive and looks like it manipulates search engine results. Duplicate content is not a copied content per se. So, when you create website content that associates “added-value,” and “relevance” though not that unique, ensure a thorough plagiarism check and duplicate content check, Google recognizes it when it is relevant for a particular query search. Focus mainly on consolidating the ranking leverage and quality potentials of your canonicalized website content or pages by minifying website content duplication or near-duplicate content. Remember that it is the lack of positive signals and not necessarily the abundance of duplicate content on your website. That is the real website content duplication issue, especially when the positive signals of your website content fail to reach Google because of the lack of unique website content or SEO value. It would affect how you rank faster and better on Google and the user’s value preference. So, start your duplicate content controls now.