Duplicate content: what to get right first

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. If you only fix one thing about duplicate content this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

Duplication splits signals rather than doubling them. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

Product variants are a common accidental source. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Canonicals or consolidation both solve it. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about duplicate content before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Canonicals or consolidation both solve it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.