What Google does with duplicates
Google groups pages with the same or nearly the same content and picks one canonical URL to show. Its documentation says that if you do nothing, your site will likely do fine, because Google picks a version for you. You still get better results when you choose the version yourself.
Technical duplicates vs copied content
- Same page at several URLs
- Caused by parameters, slashes or HTTPS
- Not a spam issue
- Fixed with redirects and canonicals
- Same text on many pages or sites
- Caused by templates, cloning or scraping
- Can break Google's spam policies
- Fixed by writing unique pages
When duplication becomes a real problem
Google's spam policies name doorway abuse, which means many similar pages built to rank for slightly different searches. Forty city pages that differ only in the city name fit that description. Scraping, which means copying other sites' content without adding value, is also a named violation.
Bad example. A cleaning company publishes 40 city pages with the same text and a swapped city name. Google indexes a few and ignores the rest, and the site looks low-effort.
Good example. The same company builds five city pages for the areas it really serves. Each has local job photos, reviews from that area, real travel times and neighborhood-specific details.
How to find and fix duplicates
- Check the Page indexing report for duplicate reasons.
- Crawl the site with Screaming Frog to find matching titles and content.
- Redirect true duplicates to the version you want to keep.
- Add canonical tags where both URLs must stay live.
- Rewrite or merge thin pages that only swap a name.
Product descriptions copied from a manufacturer and service text shared across sister sites are common sources too. Rewrite them in your own words with your own proof.
Read about canonical tags. Our technical SEO team finds duplicates across your whole site and fixes them at the source.