New perspectives on duplicate content How do ranking factors and evolving search technologies impact the way we handle duplicate content? What does the future hold for similar content on the web? Join OnCrawl Ambassador Omi Sido and Alexis Sanders as they explore the question of duplicate content.

1. New perspectives on duplicate content
Alexis Sanders
Senior SEO Manager at Merkle
Omi Sido
Technical SEO at Canon Europe
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2. Why should SEOs care about duplicate content?
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3. There is no manual
penalty for duplicate
content.
Source: October 2015 Google Hangout

4. Source: 10 Things I Hate About You
the
website
you
don’t
want to
be

5. what a user sees: what a bot sees:
Umm, I think I
like the white
shirt better…

6. Source: Introduction to Information Retrieval (c19)
“by some estimates,
as many as 40% of
the pages on the
web are duplicates
of other pages”

7. 1. Indexing Challenges
2. Lower Link Impact
3. Internal Competition
4. Poor Crawl Bandwidth

8. Common sources of duplication:

9. o Repetitive page
o Doorway pages
o Inventory control
o Syndicated content
o PR releases
o Republishing
o Plagiarism
o Non-unique copy
o Localized content
o Thin content
o Staging sites
o HTTP vs. HTTPS
o Subdomain
o URL cases
o File extensions
o Trailing slash
o Index pages
o Parameters
o Pagination
o Mobile Configuration
o Internal site search
technical content
o Facets
o Sorts
o Image-only

10. How can SEOs find and identify duplicate content?
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11. 1. Know your user journey
7. If your content is stolen:
Request a canonical tag
File a DCMA request
6. Strategically → consolidate,
create, delete, optimize
5. Leverage
appropriate
signaling
4. If the pages are
100% duplicate,
consolidate w/
a 301 redirect
3. Prioritize
duplicate
content
issues that are
affecting
performance
2. Create a strong
hierarchical URL taxonomy

12. oncrawl > Duplicate Content

13. oncrawl > Duplicate Content > By Group

14. Google
• Direct quotes in Google
• Searching via site:searches
• site:
• site: + inurl:
• intitle:
• filetype: (for file extensions)

15. GSC > Coverage > Duplicate …

16. •Quetext
•Noplag
•PaperRater
•Grammarly
•CopyScape
Plagiarism Tools

17. Keyword Density

18. Resolving duplicate content:
a memorable case
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19. +64.2% in sessions Y/Y from Google organic.
Adding unique content.

20. +28.7% in sessions Y/Y from Bing organic.
From only H1  SSR full UX

21. HTTPS
HTTP
Once fixed, clicks
returned to normal
range on HTTPS w/in
3-4 days.
Accidental HTTP
canonical.
Estimated 5-10%
loss.

22. What is new for duplicate content
in the past year and a half?
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23. What will duplicate content management
look like in the future?
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24. • Less technical-based duplicate content (as CMS wise up)
• More automation (unit testing and external testing)
• Automatically detect high similarity pages and page types
for writers and content managers
• Google continue to improve their existing systems and
detection
• Perhaps an alert system to escalate issue of Google not
using the right canonical
Alexis’ hopes for the future,

25. Do you have a favorite technical trick?
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26. • EC2 remote computer instance
• Check mobile first testing tool
• Switch user agent to Googlebot
• Using TechnicalSEO.com’s robots.txt
tool
• Screaming frog log analyzer
• Made with Love’s htaccess checker
• Using Google Data Studio to report on
changes (syncing Sheets with updates,
filtering each page by relevant updates)
Alexis’ tech SEO tricks

27. Do you have a least favorite technical SEO question?
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28. Do you have a favorite googlebot?
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29. Alexis: I like the idea that
Googlebot is tired and
overworked (from crawling 130
trillion URLs).

30. Do you have a favorite planet?
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31. Launching the best SEO tips
into space
Next up on June 27th
from Bordeaux, France
FULL AGENDA AT WWW.ONCRAWL.COM/SEOINORBIT