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Duplicate copy across pages: Crawl Audit check 190

Crawl Audit check 190 compares pages on your site for identical opening copy. Why duplicate content isn't a penalty, and why it still costs you.

Zain Kazmi2 min read
On this page
Check
190 of 200
Module
Content Quality & Accessibility
Group
Content Integrity, Readability & Social Metadata
Impact
Medium

Short answer: when several of your pages say the same thing, search engines have to pick one to show, and visitors who land on the others get nothing new. Check 190 compares a sample of your pages in the full audit and warns when their main copy is the same.

What Crawl Audit checks

  • Full audit: it samples several of your internal pages and compares the first 60 words of each page's main content. Matches are flagged.
  • Free check: only one page is fetched, so it passes with "single page audited".

It compares openings only. Two pages with different intros and identical bodies won't be caught.

What Google says

  • "Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation of our spam policies, but it can be a bad user experience".
  • On the "penalty": "It's inefficient, but it's not something that will cause a manual action. Copying others' content, however, is a different story."
  • For pages that must be similar, a canonical tag helps Google "consolidate the signals they have for the individual URLs (such as links to them) into a single, preferred URL."

Fixing it

  • Give each page its own opening that says what's specific to it.
  • Merge pages that really are the same, and redirect the old address.
  • For necessary near-copies (print versions, filtered lists), point a canonical tag at the main one (check 36).

On devmarde.com

The free check passes for every site, including ours. We haven't published a full-audit result for this check.

Sources

All 200 Crawl Audit checks

See how your site does on every check.

Crawl Audit runs this check and 199 others on your domain. The full report is $7.89, one time. The free check on this site covers 25.