The Dangers of Duplicate Content | The Digital Clicks Blog
Having duplicate content on the web can cause multiple problems when it comes to SEO and marketing online. More than one web page displaying the same content can cause an unwanted battle for dominance in terms of search engine results. When the same content is used on two different sites, Google will automatically rank both of them down. If this is the case, it is very advisable to come up with a solution as to which site this content should be posted on, or both sites could lose out. Another form of duplicate content could come in the form of canonicalization issues. This is when sites could have multiple URLs pointing to the same place. e.g., http://… or https://. This causes more of a problem as search engines index URLs rather than pages. A common form of duplicate content comes in the form of descriptions of products taken straight from the manufacturer; this can damage e-commerce searches and hurt your online sales. Issues of mirroring sites as well as providing web pages for content to be printed can also be counterproductive when not handled correctly. It is extremely important to keep an eye on what search engines follow and index for a website to climb the pages of a typical Google search. This can be detrimental to the entire site, not just one page. However, it is not the end of the world; this duplicate content can occur quite naturally, and as stated, there are many ways of handling it. Optimising your website on all fronts and filling it with relevant and interesting content is probably more important, but avoiding duplicate content is a key factor in SEO.