How to avoid duplicate content

MARTIN SPLITT: You can specify the canonical URL with this tag
to help Google Search decide which of the possibly many
URLs to index for this page.
Note that this tag is often used incorrectly by website owners,
so Google Search can't rely on it and treats it as a hint
but might choose a different URL anyway.
More on that later.
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In this video, we will address duplicate content.
I'll give you three tips to avoid or remove it.
Many of you have probably seen or heard
about duplicate content.
Some people think it influences the perceived quality of a site,
but it doesn't.
It does cause some challenges for website owners,
though, because it's harder to track performance of pages
with duplicates.
It might make similar content compete with each other.
And it can cause pages to take longer
to get crawled if this happens at a larger scale.
So it's not great and is something
you might want to clean up.
But it isn't something that you should lose sleep over.
In Google Search Console, you might
come across these reasons for why a page isn't indexed--
duplicate without user-selected canonical, alternate page
with proper canonical tag, or duplicate
Google chose different canonical than user.
Are these problems?
No, not really.
They are reasons why a page wasn't indexed.
But if it's a duplicate, it normally
means we found the same or very similar
content with a different URL and indexed that instead.
So the content is in Google Search,
just not under the URL mentioned in the report.
Sometimes this also happens in connection
with international sites where multiple language versions
are very similar to each other.
It's fine, then.
Now, let's see what we can do to avoid this.
Let's start with duplicate without user-selected canonical.
This basically means that Googlebot found the same content
with different URLs.
And this is the URL that Google didn't choose for indexing.
Google Search made a decision in this case
because there is no signal in the HTML.
That signal is called a canonical tag.
You can specify the canonical URL
with this tag to help Google Search decide
which of the possibly many URLs to index for this page.
Note that this tag is often used incorrectly by website owners,
so Google Search can't rely on it and treats it as a hint
but might choose a different URL anyway.
More on that later.
All right, to fix this and get another URL indexed,
you can specify the canonical URL
in the HTML tag or an HTTP header,
as we've seen in the previous slide.
Tip number two now addresses the duplicate Google
chose different canonical than user reason
for not indexing a page.
You might see this in the Google Search Console report as well.
It usually happens if there are links pointing to another URL
instead of what the canonical declares.
To fix it, look for internal links pointing at this URL
and change them to point to your desired canonical URL instead.
Should these links come from other websites,
you can try configuring your server
to redirect to the canonical URL instead.
If you choose to redirect, consider using a 301 redirect
to avoid performance impacts for users as their browsers will
remember this redirect and avoid unnecessary network round trips
in the future.
My last tip is more strategic if you
find that you have multiple, very similar pages, even
if Google doesn't consider them duplicates, try to combine them.
It makes information easier to find for your users,
will make reporting in Google Search Console
easier to work with, and will reduce clutter on your site.
So revisit your pages from time to time
to see if things can be simplified and combined.
All right, we went through three things
to do when you want to reduce duplicated content.
Basically, combine similar pages when possible,
set a canonical URL in your code or in the HTTP headers,
and consider redirecting from noncanonical URLs
to the canonical ones.
Please leave us a comment if you want more technical content
on Google Search Central and what topics
we should cover in the future.
Thanks a lot for watching, and see you soon.
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