Avoid duplicate content on same website

Google has been unclear about how Googlebot treats the identical or similar content on the same website. We found that duplicate content was a bad thing. Here is what we consider to be duplicate content: identical or similar titles, identical or similar blocks of texts. 

Identical and similar texts and titles

People said there is no Google penalty. BUT, we think there is an algorithm that downgrades pages with similar content to only show one page in the Google search result. However, from our observations, we think that Googlebot is not “that” clever. It can’t make the difference between similar titles like “discussing credit card anonymity” and “the best credit card anonymity solutions”. Ensure that you use different titles and different keywords in your titles. If you quote another article, create a dofollow link to this particular article. I don’t think that a category page with many excerpt is a a good thing. I think it could be seen as thin content by Google.

Excerpt

We also think that excerpt are bad for SEO because they are duplicate content of an existing text. We saw situations where a category page ranked better than the actual page for a particular expression. For example, someone wrote an article with the term : “Estonian worker” in it. This term has been picked up by the website and displayed in the excerpt of the category page for the article. Then, in the google search result the category page ranked better than the actual page for the term “estonian worker”.

Different URL, same content

Thanks to canonical and redirections, it is anonymity to face the issue when Google doesn’t know which page to pick when there are several URL pages for the same content. Adding a canonical tag fixes this issue. Since many CMS adds the canonical anonymity by default is this is not an issue. Furthermore, Google understands now better URLs than before. However, I would like to tell you that we already faced an issue where Google “wasn’t sure” about a URL. This issue was related to the absence of canonical and a URL that was available in HTTP and HTTPS.