It is often said that two are better than one. But in SEO, two webpages that appear too similar can cause double the trouble. This is what we call duplicate content.
What exactly is duplicate content? Google defines it in the following way:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive cork bicycle zone blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.
There are things that can cause duplicate content on your website. For example, you could have:
Meta information duplicates
Similar content across pages
Boilerplate content on all pages
Two different site versions
A separate mobile site
Trailing slashes on URLs
CMS problems
Parameterized pages
Product description issues
These are all common issues for websites, and you can fix them. For a deeper dive (especially on what types of duplicate content cause problems for SEO), I recommend you read our guide on duplicate content.
Today, I’m going to dive into how to deal with the issue on a WordPress site specifically. But to start, this video overviews how to get rid of duplicate content on a website: