Google’s Martin Splitt: Duplicate Content Doesn’t Impact Site Quality

Duplicate Content Doesn’t Impact Site Quality

Google’s Search Central team has released a new video in its “SEO Made Easy” series. In it, Search Advocate Martin Splitt addresses common concerns about duplicate content and provides practical solutions for website owners.

Key Takeaways

Despite concerns in the SEO community, Google insists that duplicate content doesn’t harm a site’s perceived quality.

Splitt states:

“Some people think it influences the perceived quality of a site but it doesn’t. It does cause some challenges for website owners though, because it’s harder to track performance of pages with duplicates.”

However, it can create several operational challenges that website owners should address:

Difficulty in tracking page performance metrics
Potential competition between similar content pieces
Slower crawling speeds, especially at scale

Splitt adds:

“It might make similar content compete with each other and it can cause pages to take longer to get crawled if this happens at a larger scale. So it’s not great and is something you might want to clean up, but it isn’t something that you should lose sleep over.”

Three Solutions

1. Implement Canonical Tags

Splitt recommends using canonical tags in HTML or HTTP headers to indicate preferred URLs for duplicate content.

While Google treats these as suggestions rather than directives, they help guide the search engine’s indexing decisions.

Splitt clarifies:

“This tag is often used incorrectly by website owners so Google search can’t rely on it and treats it as a hint but might choose a different URL anyway.”

2. Manage Internal Links and Redirects

When Google chooses different canonical URLs than specified, website owners should:

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