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Comments on In 2025, how does duplicated content affect search behavior?

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In 2025, how does duplicated content affect search behavior? Question

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For years, the "common wisdom" (as this not-especially-wise person understands it) has been that duplicated content harms SEO. For example, asking a question on Quora and then reposting it on SO, or posting something on Reddit and Codidact, or posting a blog entry on Dreamwidth and also posting it on my personal domain, would harm the search-engine placement of the smaller or newer site, not just for that particular page but for all pages.

It feels like search algorithms and/or indexing have changed a lot in the last couple of years. Many people have observed that Google search results have gotten much worse in this time, and there are more search providers than there used to be (Kagi, DDG, others). Have these changes affected how we need to think about duplicated content when it comes to search?

In 2025, what are the effects of duplicated (or near-duplicated) content on the search results for the less-significant site?

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If all the identical-ish AI slop topping search results is anything to go by, probably not. But /... (2 comments)
If all the identical-ish AI slop topping search results is anything to go by, probably not. But /...
Zoe‭ wrote 2 days ago

If all the identical-ish AI slop topping search results is anything to go by, probably not. But /shrug, I don't think it's possible to get a straight answer anymore. SEO is a lot less obvious than it used to be.

As a demonstration of this in practice, a quick search into this question found a lot of AI slop saying mostly the same thing, including one post citing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/duplicate-content. This URL has since turned into a redirect, and posts written this year and even this month claim the URL still says a thing it hasn't since some time in late 2022-early 2023. Archive from 2020.

The source content saying dupe content is bad has since been removed, and purely turned into general canonical URL stuff, without indicating anything about general duplicate content policies.

Zoe‭ wrote 2 days ago

The point being, finding an actual answer to this is likely impossible, especially if search engines eventually lean more into genAI-based search or the search engines otherwise switch to algorithm with rules that are far less clear.

That said, and purely observationally, Stack Exchange has a lot of scrapers that post content verbatim (and without attribution or backlinks), and those semi-often outrank SO, or rank slightly below the original source. It's... complicated, even if duplicated content did affect pagerank.