What is Duplicate Content SEO?

Duplicate content is a content that was copied from one source and appears in more than one website that can cause a penalty by Google search engine.

Read almost anything about it, and you’ll come away believing that your site is a ticking time bomb of duplicate content issues. A Google penalty is merely days away.

Thankfully, this isn’t true—but duplicate content can still cause SEO issues. And with 25–30% of the web being duplicate content, it’s useful to know how to avoid and fix such issues.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

A) What duplicate content is.

B) Why duplicate content is bad for SEO.

C) Whether Google has a duplicate content penalty.

D) Common causes of duplicate content.

E) How to check for (and fix) duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is exact or near-duplicate content that appears on the web in more than one place. It can occur on a single website or cross-domain.

For example, if I were to republish this post at ahrefs.com/blog/duplicate-content-copy/, then that would be duplicate content. That would also be true if I were to republish it on another website.

Google states that most duplicate content is not deceptive in origin.

Why is duplicate content bad for SEO?

Duplicate content may harm your SEO performance for a few reasons:

1) Undesirable or unfriendly URLs in search results.

2) Backlink dilution.

3) Burns crawl budget.

4) Scraped or syndicated content outranking you.

Read more here.