When building your website or migrating from one e-commerce platform to another, it’s important to be aware of the content that you’re publishing.  Your Google organic search results are highly dependent on many factors, duplicate content being just one of them.  Duplicate content is a negative factor that can harm your website if Google determines that your content is not valuable because the same content exists in many other places.

What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content can be wording or information that is listed on your site, or another website, that is extremely similar in content and structure.  Google has a goal of providing its users with highly relevant and engaging information.  If Google identifies multiple resources as answering the same question, Google is going to choose the website that it feels best answers the question presented by the search query and then display only that website in the search results.  This technique ensures that Google has very diverse search results, making it more likely that the person searching will find the answer that he or she seeks.

Can I cut and paste content from my old website to my new website?
If you’re migrating content and the intent is that content on PageX-OldSite is to be the same as PageX-NewSite, then there is no need for any change to the content.  That can be cut/paste.

If the new structure of the site calls for new/different pages that don’t currently exist, and the new/different pages will be in addition to information that will be migrated, then you do not want to cut/paste.

The simple way to look at this is… When we have our new site, will any of our existing content appear in more than one spot?  If so, then you’re creating duplicate content.

How to find duplicate content
Search Google for the content in question.  If you search for short two or three word phrases you won’t get very helpful results, but if you search for longer strings of text it will be easier to spot duplicate content.  You can search your own site by entering site:yoursite.com in Google and then adding in your search phrase after that.

Google Search Console will let you know if you have duplicate meta title or meta description tabs on your site.  You can find this information under “Search Appearance > HTML Improvements”

Finally, there are many online services that will check for duplicate content online.

What to do if you have duplicate content on your site
The obvious answer here is if you have duplicate content on your site rewrite the content so it isn’t an exact copy.  Sometimes this is not possible, so what do you do in that instance?

1. Use canonical links.  These are meta tags in the header that let Google know what page is the original and what page is the copy.  So if you have two pages that have duplicate content for example example.com/page-1 and example.com/page-2 and if page-1 is the more important of the two in the header of page-1 you would put:

   <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-1" />

   and in the header of page-2 you would also put:

   <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-1" />

   This code tells Google that page-1 has the original content and is the more important of the two. You can find more info on canonical URLs on Google’s Search Console help page.

2. If possible delete one of the pages and use a 301 redirect to tell Google the new URL for that page.  A 301 redirect tells Google that a page has moved.  For example if you have a product page that has a non-SEO friendly url and you decide to create a new page that has a more SEO friendly URL.  If you leave both pages up, you will have an issue with duplicate content. We suggest deleting the old page and using a 301 redirect to send traffic to the new page.  Doing this retains most, if not all, of the SEO juice the old page has. Many ecommerce platforms have built in tools to help with 301 redirects. If your platform does not, or if you don’t know how to access it, Ventura Web Design may be able to help you.

Want an expert opinion on your unique question?
Contact Ventura Web Design & Marketing today for a custom review of your website and search engine optimization strategy.  Put our more than twenty years of experience to use today.