Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is the same material appearing in more than one place on your site, with nothing to say which instance is the real one. The phrase usually brings to mind whole pages of repeated prose. On most small business sites the repetition is somewhere far more consequential and much easier to miss: in the title and the one-line summary, the two things a machine reads before it reads anything else.

It is almost never deliberate. A site builder templates every title as the section name plus the company, so eleven pages arrive called “Services”. A description gets written once in the site settings and quietly inherited by every page beneath it. A firm with offices in four towns publishes four location pages that differ by a street name. None of this is padding or trickery — it is the natural result of building a site efficiently.

The cost is a decision taken out of your hands. When several pages make an identical claim about themselves, a machine choosing which one answers a question has nothing to choose on, so it picks one and sets the others aside — or treats the whole set as a single page. The one it keeps is not necessarily the one you would have chosen. Your strongest page can lose quietly to your own weakest, and nothing anywhere reports that it happened.

The repair is unglamorous and mostly one afternoon's work. Give each page a title naming what is different about it — the town, the client, the product, the question it answers — rather than the section they all share. Write each page its own one-sentence summary. Where the duplication is one page reachable at several addresses rather than several pages saying the same thing, the tool is different: that is what a canonical address is for.

The plain version: imagine handing someone six business cards that all read “Consultant”. Nothing on them is untrue, and none of them helps. They would keep one and put the rest down — which is precisely what happens here, except that you never get to see which one they kept.