It’s commonly held that duplicate or substantially similar content is bad for SEO. When Google finds duplicate content, this creates a conflict for the algorithm. Essentially, Google gets confused as to which page should be the primary ranking URL for a given search query, so it chooses the one it believes to be the most relevant. Unfortunately, the URL it chooses may not be the one you wish to display — and, in cases of exact duplicate content, the other versions of the page may even be filtered out of search results.
The best way to fix this issue is to consolidate the duplicate/similar content’s ranking signals into a singular version of the page. In practice, this is usually done by implementing either a 301 redirect, canonical or “noindex” tag.
While many of us know this to be true, it can often be helpful to see examples of the different types of duplicate content that exist in the wild and how to best handle them. To better help you find and fix duplicate/similar content, I’ve provided case studies for three different instances where we consolidated these types of pages and noted the results we saw.
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