Definition:
Duplicate Content is what is known in SEO as content that has been copied or reused from other websites. Normally, it is used with the aim of increasing the density of keywords. However, when this happens, Google filters out the duplicate text and risks being penalized.
Duplicate content on Google
According to Google, there are times when “content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or gain more traffic. Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience […].”
Sometimes this content is duplicated voluntarily in different domains to try to manipulate the web positioning or to get more traffic. These are deceptive practices and harmful to the user experience. It could hurt doubly, since if a user sees the same content on different websites, they will not visit them again.
Why it affects and how to fix it
Duplicate content can arise in several ways, for example if we have two domains or subdomains. They are different versions that use the same meta tags and meta titles, as well as descriptions. But we can warn Google that the same content is the main one on our website, so that it does not detect it as a duplicate. The main thing to do is to change these titles and descriptions so that they don’t affect Google searches.
Another type of content when we have several different domains can be solved by creating redirects to the page that we do want to position. This way Google will show the content to a single page. If, for example, we have the same website but for several languages and countries, they must have differences in urls. Duplicate content may also arise because other external websites have copied ours. For these cases there are tools that detect it and thus avoid positioning problems. If we copy fragments of other content on our website, the same thing will happen to us.
It should be noted that you should not block search engines from detecting duplicate content. It could be worse because if they can’t crawl them they will automatically consider them as separate pages. In these cases you should let them find these pages and mark them as duplicates.