Having fresh, unique content is vitally important for effective website SEO. Yet a common problem businesses face is the proliferation of unintentionally duplicated content - both internally on their own sites or externally found word-for-word somewhere online. Whether snippets, paragraphs, pages, or entire blogs, duplicate content not properly addressed hinders site performance.

The reason duplicate content damages SEO stems from search engines’ desire to display only the most relevant, authoritative pages in results for any given searcher query. When Google or Bing crawl multiple identical or highly similar pieces of content, they effectively become competing pages targeting the same keywords and topics.

With no way to discern quality between completely duplicated content, search engines typically will pick only one version to surface in rankings while filtering out the rest. Any work optimizing those now hidden pages gets negated as engines don’t reward duplicate effort.

Even slight versions of duplication like boilerplate web pages or product descriptions pulled from a single source but scattered across sites get flagged. While not always fully removed from rankings, heavily duplicated sites struggle to climb over competitors offering search engines truly unique value through original content.

Businesses suddenly may notice impressive performing site areas sinking in rankings. Scale duplication and eventually search engines impose more serious filters hiding entire domains from visibility as unreliable sources, tanking brands reliant on SEO traffic.

The solution lies in continuous discovery and removal duplicated of content through comparison tools spotting internal and external duplication issues. Then overwrite or consolidate content spread redundantly across sections. Develop workflows encouraging regular creation of new, distinctive content showcasing thought leadership and relevance worthy of rankings.

Duplicate content constitutes a hidden destroyer of SEO success. But mitigating its impacts early and often enables businesses to keep pages indexed, drawing in targeted traffic to fuel conversions. Discuss duplicate content detection and SEO recovery options with one of our digital marketing experts today.