What is internal duplicate content?
Internal duplicate content is text that appears on more than one page of the same website — for example the same service description on several city pages, or product pages that differ only by colour. Search engines then have to choose which version to rank, and often rank none of them well.
What is the difference between duplicate, common and unique content?
Duplicate content is text shared between a few of your pages. Common content appears on a large share of your pages — usually the menu, footer and sidebars — and is normal. Unique content appears on only one page. Healthy sites keep duplicate content low and unique content high.
How does the checker find duplicate content?
We crawl your pages, read the visible text and break it into overlapping eight-word sequences. Sequences found on many pages are classed as common, those shared by a few pages as duplicate, and the rest as unique. Each page then gets a duplicate percentage and a list of the pages it overlaps with most, and you can open any page to see the repeated text highlighted.
How much duplicate content is too much?
There is no fixed limit, but a site-wide duplicate figure above about 15–20% usually means templated pages are competing with each other. Individual pages that are more than 30% duplicate deserve attention first.
Does the checker look at other websites?
No — it compares your pages with each other only (internal duplicates). To find copies of your content on other sites you need a plagiarism search across the web.
How do I fix duplicate content?
Rewrite each page so its main content is genuinely unique, merge near-identical pages and redirect the extras, or add a canonical tag pointing to the preferred version when the duplicates must stay. Our free detailed audit can recommend the right fix for each page.