Duplicate Content

Internet Marketing Glossary - Definition:

Duplicate Content

The act of having content that is the same on two or more different web pages. Duplicate content can be caused by canonicalization where you have different URLs for the same page.

Search engines may penalize a site for having too much duplicate content, however the most common issue is having a non-preferred version of a page display in the search engines. Duplicate content is considered spamming by search engines and therefore should be avoided.

A couple things you can do to cut down on duplicate content include: specifying a canonical URL, excluding directories with duplicate content in your robots.txt, and ensuring product pages on your store site have static locations.