What is Really Google's Duplicate Content Penalty

Does duplicate content penalty exist and what to do about it?

A duplicate content penalty is not exactly a myth.

It exists in the sense that your content can be filtered but it is not a penalty because it may not impact your whole site.

But how does it work?

Google refers to it as deduplication.

1. Deduplication of similar content

When your site has very almost the same pages (or pages serving the same search intent), or when you syndicate content to other platforms (or when your content is scraped), Google will have to choose to show one of many similar pages. It doesn’t affect your site in a negative way (the presence of duplicate content is not a red flag for Google) but it is important to make sure that:

• A better (more engaging, more relevant, more recent, etc.) page is ranked in Google.

• Your page (instead of a syndicated/scraped page) is ranking in Google.

You can use canonical tags for Google to know which is a better page to rank (but this is rather a suggestion, not a directive). The best way to ensure Google ranks a better version of a page is to remove or consolidate duplicate content where possible.

The only time when I would really be worried about duplicate content is when a scraped version of your page is over-ranking your own site with the original content. Google is usually very good at determining scraped content (partly because it is usually hosted on spammy sites with no strong SEO signals), so if it starts outranking your site, there’s some serious SEO problem with it.

2. Deduplication of featured snippets

Originally known as answer boxes, featured snippets show up on top of search results to give a quick answer when a page offers a concise answer to the search query. When a URL is featured in search, it loses its organic position as part of the deduplication effort.

This may negatively impact organic click-through because featured snippets are designed to give an answer right away so there is often no need to click. There’s not much you can do about it but if you see a page generating fewer clicks without losing positions in Search Console, check if it is featured.

Google is expected to deduplicate its AI Overviews this year which will also impact click-through for URLs that are currently ranking organically and in AI Overviews.

3. Deduplication of top stories

“Top Stories” is a section that shows up for breaking news. When a URL appears in top stories, it may lose its organic position.

4. Domain-based deduplication

This is a specific type of deduplication that has nothing to do with content diversification. Google won’t show the same domain on page one of search results even for navigational queries (when a search query contains a brand name).

It is important to monitor your brand name queries to know which other domains show up for those searches and how you can better control them.