By Anthony Cicirello
Not a penalty, but still a drag
Duplicate content doesn’t usually get you punished outright, but it splits your ranking signal across multiple pages instead of concentrating it on one strong page, which hurts you either way.
Where it usually comes from
Similar location pages with the city name swapped and little else changed. Product descriptions copied straight from a manufacturer. An old page that never got removed after a redesign, now competing with its replacement.
The fix
Consolidate near-duplicate pages into one strong version, and redirect the weaker ones into it. For pages that need to exist separately, like different city pages, make sure each has genuinely distinct content, not just a swapped name.
Check your own site
Search a distinctive sentence from your own content in quotes on Google and see if it turns up more than once, that’s often how duplication hides in plain sight.
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