Mar 26 2009

Quickly Find Your Site Duplicate Content Issues

Google hates duplicate content, not only the one that involves content plagiarism but also absolutely innocent one, when identical content occurs due to the site broken information architecture or CMS.

The worst part of that is that you might be totally unaware of the issue because this may be about “partial duplication”, e.g. identical titles.

So, here are two simple ways to find identical titles throughout your site:

1. Crawl your site with Xenu and sort the URLs by title:

2.  Verify your site with Google Webmaster Site Tools, wait a few days for it to collect the data, navigate Diagnostics => Content Analysis and make sure you have no duplicate titles there:

Any other ways to check for duplicate content? Share them!

29 Responses to “Quickly Find Your Site Duplicate Content Issues”

  1. ushanarya (Ushan Arya) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    Check weather ur content is duplicate.. http://tinyurl.com/dmq9w8

  2. gillestoubiana (gilles toubiana) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    Je lis : Quickly Find Your Site Duplicate Content Issues | Daily SEO Tip http://tinyurl.com/dmq9w8

  3. TheZenBull (The Zen Bull) says:
    December 31, 1969 at 11:59 pm

    Quickly find your site duplicate content issues http://is.gd/pl5Y

  4. Frank Marcel says:
    March 27, 2009 at 2:14 am

    Well, this also leads to find the so-called “keyword canibalization”, when people try to optimize the same keywords on many many pages.

    Nice SEO tip!

    Frank Marcel’s last incredible blog post..Google SEO. Sim, o Google usa SEO!

  5. John Williams says:
    March 27, 2009 at 4:41 am

    Check out these tools to trace out duplicate content issues.

    1. http://www.copyscape.com/
    2. http://www.duplicatecheck.com/
    3. http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

    Hope this helps!

    James Reply:
    March 31st, 2009 at 1:15 pm

    Also you might try Fairshare and watch your feed of matches.
    http://www.fairshare.cc

  6. Web application development says:
    March 27, 2009 at 5:04 am

    Xenu and google web master are awesome tools for checking duplicate content. Infect through copyscape.com we can check our potential content who Evered copy into their blog or sites..

    I love to read your posts.

    Web application development’s last incredible blog post..Guidelines for choosing an authentic seo service provider

  7. Jim says:
    March 27, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    So if you find that you have copied your own content, do you get to use the pirate graphic? ;~)
    -Jim

    Ann Smarty Reply:
    March 27th, 2009 at 4:20 pm

    Let me try to guess what you are hinting at… ;)

  8. Lisa says:
    March 27, 2009 at 2:27 pm

    GSiteCrawler offers it up under Statistics > Duplicate content. Easiest way I know to get an additional glimpse of what’s going on and it’s reliable. I also like webconf’s Similar Page Checker to see just how alike two pages really are.

  9. Steen Öhman says:
    March 28, 2009 at 11:06 am

    Always use the old trusted xenu.

    Google is another usefull tool, as I normally look at the pages indexed in google with the tools in webmaster tools.

    This shows you the pages in the “natural” enviroment, and it’s easy to spot duplicate content issues and other issues with meta descriptions, titles …

    Steen Öhman’s last incredible blog post..SEO David Naylor on reputation management

  10. Nate says:
    March 31, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    What about submissions to directory sites like http://www.pliggme.com

    Nate’s last incredible blog post..Search Engine Optmization Basics | Coins Online | HTML Baics

  11. Greg says:
    March 31, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    I really really wish there was a web-based thing that could do what Xenu does. I’m using Mac OSX – are there any alternatives for me?

  12. Sexy Lingerie says:
    April 3, 2009 at 9:04 pm

    How much of an impact does duplicate titles really make?

  13. Oliver says:
    April 29, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    Duplicate content is definitely a problem but I try to stay clear of that especially when writing content for a website but it never hurts to double check it so it isn’t picked up by google and penalized, which effects the performance of the site.

  14. web life says:
    August 10, 2009 at 10:27 pm

    We also use xenu and run osx too – just get crossover and it runs perfectly.

    You could always run it in a virtual environment like fusion, but crossover does the trick nice and quickly.

  15. Term Papers says:
    September 3, 2009 at 6:50 pm

    I am trying to check content of my Term Papers website. Can anyone suggest a tool for full-site content checking?

  16. Martin says:
    September 3, 2009 at 8:39 pm

    I use Fairshare for this http://www.fairshare.cc

  17. jucarii says:
    September 8, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    How much of an impact does duplicate titles really make?

  18. South Tampa Condos says:
    September 9, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Xenu is really good tool for find duplicate title tag. I use copyscape for duplicate content checking.

  19. film izle says:
    September 16, 2009 at 5:35 pm

    So, How much of an impact does duplicate titles really make? Pls answer. thanks

  20. Health Insurance St Petersburg says:
    September 29, 2009 at 5:56 am

    I’ll check it out duplicate content of my site in Xenu and webmaster tool. Thanks for helpful information.

  21. the biggest douche in taipei says:
    October 10, 2009 at 1:37 pm

    Thanks for the info… I use xenu in conjunction with keywordspy and Traffictravis

  22. JR says:
    November 30, 2009 at 10:13 am

    Sorry to comment on such an old thread, but I have a question relating to dupe content…

    I have a client I’m working with who has several hundred websites all with v similar content, and need to get each site indexed. Each website is for a different branch of theirs (in different geographic regions). Each is on a subdomain linking back to the main domain. There is no way to get them to change the bulk of the content on each subdomain (an info resource section).

    I’ve suggested adding content relevant to each region alongside the duplicated content (local news etc), making sure the regional address is on each page and making sure each title tag and description is written uniquely.

    Anyone else have any suggestions?

  23. tratament sperma says:
    January 22, 2010 at 9:39 pm

    I use Google Webmaster for all this duplicate files/titles in my website. it`s easy and fast, and the best part is that google shows you where is your mistake

  24. Funkf00t says:
    August 2, 2010 at 6:10 pm

    JR, is understands this gig..

  25. crusher machine says:
    August 15, 2010 at 8:44 am

    Thank you! I did not notice this problem before, now know

  26. Becky says:
    January 22, 2011 at 6:35 am

    the original article was informative and has become more usefull while reading the comments. Thank you guys :)

  27. jackie says:
    November 4, 2011 at 5:02 am

    hey guys i have a confusing issue, i.e i have a blog which is about bloggger tricks,the issue is few 10 of other blogs have same html codes which i have posted in my blog post. .text content is different but few html codes are same n few other blogs. .does this creates a duplicate content issue??pls help me. .