Similar Content

To specify a canonical URL for duplicate or very similar pages to Google Search, you can indicate your preference using a number of methods. These are, in order of how strongly they can influence canonicalization:

Similar content

While it's generally not critical to specify a canonical preference for your URLs, there are a number of reasons why you would want to explicitly tell Google about a canonical page in a set of duplicate or similar pages:

If you publish content in many file formats, such as PDF or Microsoft Word, each on their own URL, you can return a rel="canonical" HTTP header to tell Googlebot what is the canonical URL for the non-HTML files. For example, to indicate that the PDF version of the .docx version should be canonical, you might add this HTTP header for the .docx version of the content:

Pick a canonical URL for each of your pages and submit them in a sitemap. All pages listed in a sitemap are suggested as canonicals; Google will decide which pages (if any) are duplicates, based on similarity of content.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

If you think this tag is an ideal fit for your website, review your website and address site sections that appear to have separate URLs but have similar content (e.g., copy, image, headings, title elements, etc.).

If you think there might be some other similar content culprits out there, you can take a deeper look with tools such as Similar Page Checker and Siteliner, which will review your site for similar content.

Example 2: You sell products that are highly similar where there is no unique copy on these pages but slight variations in the name, image, price, etc. Should you canonically point the specific product pages to the product parent page?

Suppose you canonically tag to the parent model page. Even if you show the content importance/hierarchy to search engines, they may still rank the canonicalized page if the search is relatively specific.

In the example below, to reduce the bloat of somewhat similar product page content from search engine reviews, meta robots noindex tags were placed on child product variation pages during the time of a domain transition/relaunch.

While not technically a penalty, duplicate content can still sometimes impact search engine rankings. When there are multiple pieces of, as Google calls it, "appreciably similar" content in more than one location on the Internet, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.

To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, and thus are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the best result. This dilutes the visibility of each of the duplicates.

Link equity can be further diluted because other sites have to choose between the duplicates as well. instead of all inbound links pointing to one piece of content, they link to multiple pieces, spreading the link equity among the duplicates. Because inbound links are a ranking factor, this can then impact the search visibility of a piece of content.

In the vast majority of cases, website owners don't intentionally create duplicate content. But, that doesn't mean it's not out there. In fact by some estimates, up to 29% of the web is actually duplicate content!

URL parameters, such as click tracking and some analytics code, can cause duplicate content issues. This can be a problem caused not only by the parameters themselves, but also the order in which those parameters appear in the URL itself.

If your site has separate versions at "www.site.com" and "site.com" (with and without the "www" prefix), and the same content lives at both versions, you've effectively created duplicates of each of those pages. The same applies to sites that maintain versions at both http:// and If both versions of a page are live and visible to search engines, you may run into a duplicate content issue.

Content includes not only blog posts or editorial content, but also product information pages. Scrapers republishing your blog content on their own sites may be a more familiar source of duplicate content, but there's a common problem for e-commerce sites, as well: product information. If many different websites sell the same items, and they all use the manufacturer's descriptions of those items, identical content winds up in multiple locations across the web.

Whenever content on a site can be found at multiple URLs, it should be canonicalized for search engines. Let's go over the three main ways to do this: Using a 301 redirect to the correct URL, the rel=canonical attribute, or using the parameter handling tool in Google Search Console.

Another option for dealing with duplicate content is to use the rel=canonical attribute. This tells search engines that a given page should be treated as though it were a copy of a specified URL, and all of the links, content metrics, and "ranking power" that search engines apply to this page should actually be credited to the specified URL.

Here, we can see BuzzFeed is using the rel=canonical attributes to accommodate their use of URL parameters (in this case, click tracking). Although this page is accessible by two URLs, the rel=canonical attribute ensures that all link equity and content metrics are awarded to the original page (/no-one-does-this-anymore).

The meta robots tag allows search engines to crawl the links on a page but keeps them from including those links in their indices. It's important that the duplicate page can still be crawled, even though you're telling Google not to index it, because Google explicitly cautions against restricting crawl access to duplicate content on your website. (Search engines like to be able to see everything in case you've made an error in your code. It allows them to make a [likely automated] "judgment call" in otherwise ambiguous situations.)

The main drawback to using parameter handling as your primary method for dealing with duplicate content is that the changes you make only work for Google. Any rules put in place using Google Search Console will not affect how Bing or any other search engine's crawlers interpret your site; you'll need to use the webmaster tools for other search engines in addition to adjusting the settings in Search Console.

When syndicating content, make sure the syndicating website adds a link back to the original content and not a variation on the URL. (Check out our Whiteboard Friday episode on dealing with duplicate content for more information.)

To add an extra safeguard against content scrapers stealing SEO credit for your content, it's wise to add a self-referential rel=canonical link to your existing pages. This is a canonical attribute that points to the URL it's already on, the point being to thwart the efforts of some scrapers.

Q: I am creating 3 web pages and optimizing each for similar but different searches. Is the okay to have similar content on these pages or same content in some parts of the page? Is it true that Google does not like similar or duplicate content?

A: Duplicate content has high chances of getting penalized by Google. If you have same content (exactly the same) on 3 web pages with same title tag, same picture, it may not be acceptable to Google. But if, you have three different blog posts that are closely related, make sure to have unique content, different title tag, and some different phrases on each.

The breadth of careers envisioned by Mathematics Majors has led to the creation of anumber of subjects with similar content. The following limitation applies to all fourdegree options: Subjects taken to satisfy the Mathematics degree requirements must nothave essentially similar content. Specifically, you may count at most one of the subjectsfrom each of the following lists.

Ben: Jordan, what do I do? Help me land the plane here. I want to create more pages. I want to start to target all of the different companies that are in the MarTech space to promote my podcast, MarTechPod.com, MarTechPod.com, MarTechPod.com, and I want to be able to reach the SEO and content marketing community and all of the other great marketers that are out there to promote my content. They all work for these companies. Should I do this strategy or not?

Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one web page. The duplicate content can be substantial parts of the content within or across domains and can be either exactly duplicate or closely similar.[1] When multiple pages contain essentially the same content, search engines such as Google and Bing can penalize or cease displaying the copying site in any relevant search results.

Non-malicious duplicate content may include variations of the same page, such as versions optimized for normal HTML, mobile devices, or printer-friendliness, or store items that can be shown via multiple distinct URLs.[1] Duplicate content issues can also arise when a site is accessible under multiple subdomains, such as with or without the "www." or where sites fail to handle the trailing slash of URLs correctly.[2] Another common source of non-malicious duplicate content is pagination, in which content and/or corresponding comments are divided into separate pages.[3]

Syndicated content is a popular form of duplicated content. If a site syndicates content from other sites, it is generally considered important to make sure that search engines can tell which version of the content is the original so that the original can get the benefits of more exposure through search engine results.[1] Ways of doing this include having a rel=canonical tag on the syndicated page that points back to the original, NoIndexing the syndicated copy, or putting a link in the syndicated copy that leads back to the original article. If none of these solutions are implemented, the syndicated copy could be treated as the original and gain the benefits.[4] 041b061a72