Search Overflow

Duplicate detection

Duplication across a corpus wastes crawl budget and splits authority.

RunningCheck id: content.duplicate-detection

What this check looks at

Duplicate detection is one of the Content SEO checks. Whether the content deserves to rank. It is judged from what your site served at the time of the crawl, and a page we could not reach is reported as unreachable rather than skipped.

It answers from these fields of the crawl record and nothing else, which is why it cannot be fooled by anything that is not on the page it was given.

  • text_fingerprint

How this one runs

This check answers entirely from a crawl of your own site. We fetch the page the way a search crawler would, parse what came back, and test the specific property this check is responsible for. There is no account to connect, no data set to license, and nothing to install, so it runs on the first audit you ever request and on every one after it.

The result is derived from what your site actually served us at that moment, not from a cached third party index that may be weeks stale. That means it reflects your site as it is today, and it also means a page behind a login, a firewall, or a robots rule we respect is a page we will report as unreachable rather than quietly skip.

What you get from it

  • Runs on every audit, on every page we are allowed to reach
  • No Google connection, no vendor subscription, no tracking script on your site
  • Re-runs on a schedule, so a regression shows up as a change rather than as a surprise

What it reports when it fails

These are the findings this check can raise, taken from the code that raises them rather than rewritten for the website. An ellipsis stands where the report fills in what it measured on your page.

  • worth fixing… of … pages are exact duplicates of another page

Where it sits in the audit

See every content check or the full catalogue of 77 checks. The documentation covers the order checks run in and how a finding is fingerprinted, and the about page explains why we publish the checks that do not run.

See this check run on your site.

No signup. The report names what it could not check as clearly as what it found.