How To Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Your Website

Duplicate content can confuse search engines (and site visitors). Learn how to minimize and manage the effects of duplicate content.

When a potential customer makes a search query online related to your ecommerce business, you want the most relevant web page from your ecommerce site to appear at the top of those search results. But what happens when search engines can’t tell which page on your website is the most relevant?

Duplicate content is one of the most common yet overlooked issues that can weaken your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). When similar or identical content appears across multiple web pages, search engines like Google and Bing struggle to determine which page deserves the top ranking.

If you want to earn more organic traffic and improve your website’s search performance, understanding how duplicate content works—and how you can fix it—is essential.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content is when a web page includes content that’s similar or identical to content on other web pages. Duplicate pages can result from internal duplicate content, meaning similar text across pages on the same website, as well as external duplicate content, meaning similar text on different websites. Duplicate content stems from technical issues, unintentional human error, plagiarism (some content scrapers scan websites and steal content to repost on third-party websites), or the reuse of wording across variations of the same page. For example, your ecommerce website might use similar text on several product pages, which can negatively influence how search engines interpret your site.

Why is duplicate content bad?

Duplicate content can negatively impact your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in several ways:

• Confused search results. When multiple pages with similar or identical content appear on a search engine results page, users and search engines struggle to understand which web page is most authoritative and relevant to their search query.

• Weakened link-building strategy. Search engines evaluate backlinks on other websites that link to your site when ranking search results. By spreading your backlinks across several versions of the same content, duplicate content can weaken a company’s backlink strategy and ultimately hurt SEO efforts. 

• Misspent crawl budget. A crawl budget is the limited amount of scanning and indexing that a search engine allocates for a specific website; duplicate content can waste a website’s crawl budget, meaning fewer pages from that site will be stored in a search engine’s database for quick listing on SERPs.

How to fix duplicate content issues

1. Audit your website to identify duplicate content
2. Redirect web pages with duplicate content
3. Add canonical tags to original pages
4. Consider noindex tags for duplicate content
5. Request duplicate content removal from other publishers

Follow these proven strategies to identify duplicate content issues within your ecommerce store and fix impacted web pages:

1. Audit your website to identify duplicate content

One of the easiest ways to check your ecommerce website for duplicate content is to use a simple Google search. Type “site:yourdomain.com” (replacing “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain name). This will show you all the pages from your site that are currently indexed by Google. Examine the search results and look for pages with similar titles, descriptions, or body content. As you find duplicate content, record the impacted URLs in a spreadsheet to determine which pages need to be reviewed and updated.

You can also identify duplicate content using a free tool like Google Search Console to generate an Index Coverage report about which web pages are indexed and which are experiencing issues like duplicate content. Google Search Console also includes a URL inspection tool that crawls your site and provides reports about duplicate content on multiple URLs. Paid software tools like Semrush and Ahrefs offer comprehensive website auditing features, including duplicate content detection.

When you use site audit tools, you can identify the exact cause of your duplicate content issues. Here are some of the most common causes of duplicate content to consider when performing your site audit:

• URL parameters.URL parameters are extra pieces of information added to the end of a URL in the address bar of a web browser that filter results, customize content, and track analytics. While useful, URL parameters can create multiple versions of the same URL, and search engines may not know which one to rank.

• Session IDs. A session ID is a unique identifier that a server assigns to a website visitor to track their activity on that site. Session IDs are commonly stored in session cookies (temporary text files stored on a user’s device for the duration of their session), but if cookies are disabled, they can also end up being appended to a URL. This can result in search engines interpreting each URL with a session ID as duplicate content.

• Domain names. A website with multiple versions of a domain can result in duplicate content, like an ecommerce site with HTTP and HTTPS versions, as well as some web pages using “www” in front of a domain and others without it.

• Pagination. Long content like an article series or product catalog can result in pagination, meaning content is split into multiple pages with nearly identical URLs—the only difference being that each has a page number appended to it.

• Scraped content. When other websites copy and republish content from your web pages, it creates duplicate content across multiple domains. 

• Repeated content. This can happen if you use similar content on multiple web pages throughout your ecommerce website (like product pages and landing pages).

2. Redirect web pages with duplicate content

One of the most reliable ways to fix duplicate content issues is to redirect web pages with duplicate content back to the particular page with the original content. When search engines scan and index your website, they follow redirects and only index the URLs where they’re redirected, ultimately increasing the search rankings of the most important pages where you choose to redirect traffic.

To implement this strategy, use a 301 redirect—an HTTP status code that tells search engines that one URL has been permanently moved to another URL. For example, if you have a Shopify store with an old product page that’s ranking on search engines and you want to redirect it to a new, similar product page while preserving rank. You can set up a 301 redirect from the Shopify admin dashboard in the Online Store section.

3. Add canonical tags to original pages

A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that signals to search engines which URL is the preferred URL for indexing. Website owners can use canonical tags to organize their websites and improve SEO efforts by helping search engines consolidate different versions of a web page under one URL—the canonical URL.

High-quality CMS platforms typically handle this for site owners; for example, Shopify themes automatically identify and determine the canonical version of a web page based on the structure of your ecommerce website and content. If you need to add canonical URLs to your store manually, you can include one line of HTML code before the closing </head> tag in your theme layout file that reads:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">

4. Consider noindex tags for duplicate content

If duplicate content is still ranking on SERPs after implementing 301 redirects and canonical tags, consider adding HTML code that tells search engines to ignore that specific page—also known as a noindex tag.

Adding noindex tags to a page with duplicate content removes it from SERPs, ensuring that the page you want to prioritize has less competition. You can place a noindex tag before the closing </head> tag in your theme layout file, similar to the placement of canonical tags. Here is the HTML code for a noindex tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

5. Request duplicate content removal from other publishers

While you analyze SERPs for keywords relevant to your business and explore competitive web pages, you might discover duplicate content that was scraped directly from your website and published by another website. In this case, contact the publisher of that scraped content directly and request the removal of web pages with duplicate content.

Duplicate content FAQ

What is the meaning of duplicate content?

Duplicate content is material on a web page that’s similar or identical to content on a different web page, either on the same site (internal duplicate content) or on a web page published by a different site (external duplicate content).

Is duplicate content bad for SEO?

Yes, duplicate content can hurt your website’s SEO performance by complicating search results with multiple pages, weakening your link-building strategy by spreading links across several pages, and wasting the crawl budget that search engines allocate to scan and index your website.

How do you identify duplicate content?

Identify duplicate content by reviewing your website’s indexed pages through search queries and conducting a comprehensive site audit using tools like Google Search Console.

How do I fix duplicate content?

Effective ways to fix duplicate content include implementing 301 redirects for web pages with duplicate content to consolidate duplicate URLs, adding canonical tags to the original web pages to indicate the preferred version of a page, and using noindex tags on pages that should be excluded from search engine results.