Signs it is time to revisit duplicate content

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. A few signals that duplicate content is due some attention.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Duplication splits signals rather than doubling them
• Product variants are a common accidental source

Where to start

Canonicals or consolidation both solve it. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

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
• Duplication splits signals rather than doubling them — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.