Google's definition of duplicate content:

"Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin."

Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

• Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
• Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
• Printer-only versions of web pages

Google tries hard to index and show pages with distinct information. This filtering means, for instance, that if your site has a 'regular' and 'printer' version of each article, and neither of these is blocked with a noindex meta tag, Google will choose one of them to list.

If the content of a page can be found on multiple pages, Google only displays one of these pages in the search results. Unfortunately, this might not be the page that you want to see.

Removing duplicate content from your pages will have a positive influence on the rankings of your web pages. There are several things that you can do to avoid duplicate content problems:

• Use 301 redirects to redirect visitors to the correct pages on your website.
• Always use the same link to link to a page, i.e. do not link to /page, /page/index.htm and /page/.
• Use the rel=canonical tag to inform Google about the preferred version of a page. Details about the attribute can be found here. For most duplicate content issues, this is the best solution.
• Use country-specific domains for country-specific content. Use domain.de instead of domain.com/de.
• Syndicate your content carefully. If the websites that show your content are more popular than your own websites, they will be shown in Google's search results.
• Avoid long boilerplate texts on all pages. Better link to a page with the details.
• Avoid similar pages. If you have several pages with similar content, consider merging them into one page.

Optimize your website now

"Google's John Mueller listed a few reasons why your site may not show rich results in the Google Search Results. One of the three reasons is that sometimes Google does not trust the site enough, on the site level, for Google to warrant that the site shows rich results."

"With hreflang, any version of a page that you have (x-default or whatever) should be referenced from all other pages of that set. We need those cross-references to confirm the annotations. So if you have an x-default, the other pages of that set should list that too."

"Once third-party cookies are phased out, Google will not build or use alternate identifiers to track users across the web, the company announced on Wednesday. It also reiterated that its web products will be driven by the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) API, which groups people with similar interests into cohorts so that advertisers can still serve relevant ads while providing a degree of individual privacy."

"This new patent is also about language models. It tells us that the use of speech recognition is becoming more and more common and that as technology has advanced, people using computing devices have increased access to speech recognition functionality."