{"id":8733,"date":"2021-02-01T13:33:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T13:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.seo-marketing.koeln\/google-duplicate-content-is-not-considered-a-negative-ranking-factor\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T09:33:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T09:33:24","slug":"google-duplicate-content-is-not-considered-a-negative-ranking-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/google-duplicate-content-is-not-considered-a-negative-ranking-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"GOOGLE: DUPLICATE CONTENT IS NOT CONSIDERED A NEGATIVE RANKING FACTOR"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Google: Duplicate content is not a negative ranking factor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Content that is repeated on several pages does not result in a website being ranked lower in the search results. Mueller says that it is normal for a website to have a certain amount of duplicate content<\/a>. Google’s algorithms<\/a> are also designed to deal with this accordingly. Duplicate content is a topic that comes up regularly among SEOs and it’s something that many practitioners look out for when reviewing a website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

So does duplicate content influence the search ranking<\/a>? If so, to what extent?<\/p>\n\n

That’s exactly what Davor Bobek, Manager at Blue Glacier, asks Mueller in this week’s Consultation. Bobek himself has a website<\/a> about car parts, on which descriptions of car parts are repeated in several places. He would like to know whether this fact will have a negative impact on the search results<\/a> for him.<\/p>\n\n

Mueller’s answer follows below.<\/p>\n\n

\"duplicate-content\"<\/figure>\n\n

John Mueller from Google about duplicate content<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n

Mueller clears up the misunderstanding of duplicate content<\/a> and says that it is not something that entails a negative ranking value.<\/p>\n\n

If entire pieces of content are duplicated on a website, Google<\/a> will rank one page and not display the other. Multiple copies of the same page therefore do not send negative ranking signals.<\/p>\n\n

Duplicate pages can bloat a website<\/a> and eat up the crawl budget, but that’s a whole other topic not covered in this video.<\/p>\n\n

If sections of content<\/a> are repeated on a website, such as content in the header or footer, this also does not send negative ranking signals, Mueller confirms.<\/p>\n\n

“This type of duplicate content is not so much about the fact that it is associated with a negative score. It’s more like if we find the exact same information on multiple sites on the web and someone is specifically looking<\/a> for that information<\/a>, we then try to find the best matching site.<\/p>\n\n

So if you have the same content on several pages<\/a>, we will not display all of them. We will try to select one of them and then display it. It is therefore not the case that this sends a negative signal. In many cases, it’s quite normal that you have a certain amount of shared content on some pages.”<\/p>\n\n

To illustrate how normal duplicate content can be, Mueller cites examples that we are confronted with time and again.<\/p>\n\n

Online shopping<\/a> is an area in which content is repeated everywhere. It is common for retailers to sell the same product and the product pages are likely to share much of the same content.<\/p>\n\n

Google will not interpret negative signals from crawling<\/a> a product description that appears elsewhere on another retailer’s website.<\/p>\n\n

Website footers are technically considered duplicate content, says Mueller, but even that is not a problem when it comes to search rankings<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

“A very common case is e-commerce, for example. If you have a product and someone else is selling the same product or within the website<\/a> you might have a footer that you use on all pages – and sometimes that’s a pretty big footer. Technically, this is duplicate content, but we can deal with it. So that shouldn’t be a problem.”<\/p>\n\n

\"content-ranking\"<\/figure>\n\n

Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n

The new information we have gained from John Mueller’s message will make many people breathe a sigh of relief. Among others, our SEO experts<\/a>. Anyone who runs a store website<\/a>, or in Bobek’s case a website about car parts, is aware that it is sometimes almost impossible to avoid duplicate content<\/a>. Confusing content and strange descriptions to avoid duplicate content would be necessary.<\/p>\n\n

But now we can enjoy the official statement from Google and see once again why Google<\/a> is asserting itself as the leading search engine. This understanding of unavoidable content is significantly important. After all, everyone’s goal is still to provide website visitors with a quality answer to their search query. No potential customer<\/a> wants to struggle through complicated texts that have been rewritten for the sake of duplicate content. This is a hassle for both sides.<\/p>\n\n

By clearing up these negative rumors, which were nothing more than just that, it makes search engine optimization<\/a> and search engine ranking a much more enjoyable process in this regard. This allows the focus to return to the important qualitative optimization content<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google: Duplicate content is not a negative ranking factor Content that is repeated on several pages does not result in a website being ranked lower in the search results. Mueller says that it is normal for a website to have a certain amount of duplicate content. Google’s algorithms are also designed to deal with this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1798,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-seo-blog-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32510,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733\/revisions\/32510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seo-marketing.koeln\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}