What is duplicate content?

“What is duplicate content, Micky?”
That’s what one of the communication managers from a company I help asked.

You might have come across this before and been told that, for goodness’ sake, you must not have duplicate content on your website.

But why is that?

The basics of duplicate content

The name already gives us a hint. Duplicate content is content that appears in multiple places on your website.

You often hear SEO experts say that if you have duplicate content on your site, Google will punish you.

That’s not entirely true – but not completely false either.

Google always wants content to be unique. Therefore, duplicate content can negatively affect your rankings.

A different matter is if you have duplicate content that also appears on other websites. Then you can be punished by Google – and by some lawyers who might come after you.

What if I have the same product in several colors?

This is an ongoing challenge for webshops that sell “the same products” in different colors. Do you really have to write a product description for each item?

Both yes and no.

There are two solutions to this problem. Either you gather all your variants on one product page and write a combined product description.

Alternatively, you write a product description for each variant. You can also use the same description on several pages and just rewrite, for example, the color.

But the key is that you can do this – it’s not something I would recommend.

What about standard texts that need to be there?

Some webshops need to include standard declarations in their descriptions. Of course, you don’t have to rewrite these every time. After all, Google is a very smart search engine that can recognize this type of text.

The same goes for size guides and all kinds of other standard texts that may be used repeatedly on a webshop.