Glossary · technical-seo
What is Duplicate content?
Duplicate content is the same or nearly the same text appearing at more than one web address, either on your own site or across different sites. Google does not usually penalise it as such; it picks one version to show and filters out the rest. The problem is that it may pick the wrong one, and the signals that should strengthen one page get split across several. Duplicates are often accidental: the same page reachable with and without www, with tracking parameters, or through a print version. Canonical tags and redirects tell Google which copy is the real one.
What does Duplicate content mean for a business in Pakistan?
Pakistani e-commerce stores commonly paste the same supplier description onto every product and also onto their Daraz listing. Google then sees the store page as one of many copies of that text, and often ranks Daraz instead. Rewriting descriptions for the products that actually sell is slow work, but it is what separates a store page from the marketplace copy.
A worked example
A Peshawar Road shoe seller's product page loads at four addresses: with www, without, with a colour parameter and with a size parameter. Google indexes the colour version. Adding one canonical tag pointing at the clean address, and redirecting the non-www version, folds all four into a single page.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Canonical tagcanonical tagA canonical tag is a line in a page's HTML head, written as link rel="canonical", that tells search engines which web address is the main version of…
- 301 redirect301 redirectA 301 redirect is a permanent instruction from a server that a page has moved to a new address. Browsers send visitors straight to the new address,…
- Thin contentkamzor contentThin content is a page that gives a visitor little or nothing of value: a few lines of filler, copied manufacturer text, an auto-generated page with…
- Faceted navigationfiltersFaceted navigation is the set of filters on a category page that let shoppers narrow products by attributes such as size, colour, brand, price range…
- IndexingindexingIndexing is Google storing a copy of your page so it can be shown in results. It is the step after crawling: a bot visits the page, then Google…
Duplicate content — quick answers
What does Duplicate content mean?
Duplicate content is the same or nearly the same text appearing at more than one web address, either on your own site or across different sites. Google does not usually penalise it as such; it picks one version to show and filters out the rest.
Duplicate content ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
ڈپلیکیٹ کنٹینٹ — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "duplicate content". Pakistani e-commerce stores commonly paste the same supplier description onto every product and also onto their Daraz listing.
Why does Duplicate content matter for a business in Pakistan?
Pakistani e-commerce stores commonly paste the same supplier description onto every product and also onto their Daraz listing. Google then sees the store page as one of many copies of that text, and often ranks Daraz instead. Rewriting descriptions for the products that actually sell is slow work, but it is what separates a store page from the marketplace copy.
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