Duplicate Content

In this post, you'll discover:

• What is duplicate content?
• What is keyword cannibalization?
• Is duplicate content bad for SEO?
• What are the most common content duplication issues in Webflow?
• The best solution for duplicate content - canonical tags!

Let’s dive into it!

What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is content that exists on multiple URLs at the same time. Duplicate content can happen on a single site or even multiple websites.

Duplicate content can be exact content copies, or very similar content, that is slightly different.

Think of a CMS collection page, where almost all of the content is the same across pages.

Another example would be an e-commerce store with product variants, such as pages for a different color of a t-shirt.

Your Web Page Will Rank for Many Keywords

The most common issue with duplicate content is that if website owners become highly focused on keywords alone…

They can have much bigger problems than just duplicate content.

If a page gets search traffic from search engines, it never ranks for just for one keyword. Single page ranks for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of keywords.

So if you have pages on your site that are optimized for keywords, not keyword clusters or specific search intents, you might be creating keyword cannibalization.

What is Keyword Cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization means that you have pages on your site that are competing with each other for the same keywords.

Those who don’t have much experience with SEO might look at those articles and don’t see it happening.

However, experienced SEO professionals will easily spot when keyword cannibalization happens.

If search engines have to pick between a few versions of similar pages on your website, they tend to test all of them for the same keywords.

And eventually, decide not to rank any of the pages or ideally search engines will pick just one page from your website.

That’s because if you don’t know which page is the best and give search engines a few versions, search engines don’t trust that you know what is best for the user.

Difference Between Keyword and Search Intent

A set of different keywords can have the same search intent behind them. And each web page on your site should serve a unique search intent.

To learn more about it, be sure to check our search intent guide.

Is Duplicate Content Bad for SEO?

Google sees duplicate content as a development or technical issue. Which makes duplicate content a technical SEO issue.

Google also mentions that there is no penalty for duplicate content.

Don’t worry Google is great at understanding technical issues like https and http versions of the same page being duplicated. Or paginated versions of the same page.

That’s why search engines can assign their own canonical tag and de-index clear duplicate pages.

It’s a way of “fixing” duplicate content issues for you - whenever they happen because of technical issues.

What you should worry about is the cannibalization of content on different permanent pages on your site like:

• Similar H1s, title tags, or meta descriptions
• Same search intent
• Identical content blocks for most of the page content

Copied Content?

Another issue that might happen is that someone online is copying your content. If that’s the case…

You might want to report that to Google.

How Much Duplicate Content Can You Have?

Search engines understand that some content will repeat on all or some of your pages.

Think navigation bars, footers, CTA sections, etc. We call that boilerplate content and search engines are great at ignoring it.

Most Common Duplicate Content Issues in Webflow

Let’s dive into Webflow-specific duplicate content issues.

It’s easy to guess that most duplicate content issues on Webflow will come from CMS Collection Lists and a lack of unique CMS fields.

Duplicate Content Blocks in Webflow

Duplicate content can often creep in through CMS collections, and collection pages.

It’s easy to make your web pages worse by overusing CMS Collection lists.

Especially if you have thin content issues and most of your on-page content is dynamically pulled from the same CMS collection.

Your CMS setup requires careful and thoughtful use to avoid creating redundant, non-engaging content.

By using conditional logic, filtering and sorting you can create unique, relevant, and high-quality web pages that perform well in SEO.

Duplicate Headings

Another issue is that CMS collections will pull data from the same CMS field each time the whole Collection list is shown.

This usually means that you will have sections on your website that have identical heading structures on each page inside the same section.

It’s not something that you shouldn’t use, but it’s something to keep in mind, especially for bigger builds.

Paginated CMS Collection Lists

Webflow will technically make it correct by adding self-referencing canonicals, but pagination rarely makes sense SEO wise (unless your site is thousands of pages in size).

Let’s say you have 20 items and you set an 8-item limit…

This means your page now has +2 new duplicate pages.

The original version, and two paginated versions.

And the content (and links) in those two paginated versions can potentially be devalued by search engines. Why?

Because not all users will be subjected to that information, hence make sure that content and links in those paginated pages are less valuable than what can be seen on the main page.

Yes, you can use Finsweet's CMS Load attribute instead, but you are only changing the problem, not solving it.

That’s because crawlers often struggle to index content and links that are not inside the DOM on the initial page load.

Use Canonicals!

Your best friend in the fight against content duplication will be that powerful rel=”canonical” tag.

You can learn everything about canonicals in our complete canonicals in Webflow guide!

What Did We Learn: How to Avoid Duplicate Content?

There’s two types of content duplication issues:

• technical
• strategic.

Technical issues can be solved by using canonical tags and other best development practices.

Strategic issues means that multiple pages on your website, are competing for the same search intent and set of keywords.

Strategic issues can be solved by improving website structure and making sure that you have only one page for each search intent.

‍