What is duplicate content?

here are so many myths around duplicate content that people actually think it causes a penalty and that their pages will compete against each other and hurt their website. I see forum posts, Reddit threads, technical audits, tools, and even SEO news websites publishing articles that show people clearly don’t understand how Google treats duplicate content.

People mistake duplicate content for a penalty because of how Google handles it. Really, the duplicates are just being filtered in the search results. You can see this for yourself by adding &filter=0 to the end of the URL and removing the filtering.

Adding &filter=0 to the end of the page URL on a search for “raleigh seo meetup” will show me the exact same page twice. I’m not saying Meetup has done a good job with this, since they actually indicate the two versions (HTTP and HTTPS in this case) are both correct in their use of canonical tags, but I think it does show that the exact same page (or similar pages) are actually indexed, and only the most relevant is being shown. It’s not that the page is necessarily competing or doing any harm to the website itself.

I hope you find this information helpful…see you on the next topic