Opportunity Content
Near-duplicate content
- Severity
- Opportunity
- Impact
- Medium
- Effort to fix
- Medium
- Issue code
near_duplicate
Why it matters
The main content is about 85% or more similar to other pages, which can make them compete in search.
How to fix it
Make each page clearly different or consolidate them into one stronger page.
What this means
The main text of this page is about 85% or more similar to one or more other indexable pages. The evidence lists them with their similarity, for example "Similar to 3 page(s): /london (91%), ...".
Like exact duplicates, only main content is compared: menus, headers, footers, sidebars and forms are removed first. SiteAud!tLint compares overlapping three-word phrases, so pages that share most of their sentences score high even if a few words differ.
Why it matters
Near-duplicates are the typical footprint of pages generated from one template with a word or two swapped. Google tends to treat such groups as one page and show only one of them, which means the others rarely rank. When there are many, they can make the site look like it was built to target keywords rather than to help visitors.
Some near-duplication is normal: product variants that differ only by size or colour, or very short pages where shared boilerplate dominates.
Common causes
- Location pages that differ only by city name: "Plumber in Leeds", "Plumber in York".
- Product variants with separate URLs and copied descriptions.
- Manufacturer descriptions reused across many products.
- Tag, category and archive pages listing nearly the same posts.
- Older and newer versions of the same article published at different URLs.
How to fix it
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| Variants of one product | One URL with a variant selector, or a canonical from each variant to the main product |
| Location pages | Add what is genuinely local: services, team, reviews, projects and directions for that area, or merge them into one page |
| Reused manufacturer text | Write the key paragraph yourself, and add specifications, use cases and FAQs |
| Overlapping articles | Merge them into the stronger one and 301 redirect the other |
| Archive pages | Add a short unique introduction, or set thin ones to noindex |
Verify the fix
The Duplicate Content view in Pages shows each page's similarity and closest match, with a filter for near duplicates. Recrawl and compare: as pages become distinct, their similarity drops below 85% and the issue clears. See Duplicate content and URL structure.
How it affects your score
Finding this issue on any page costs the Content score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.
Find the affected URLs
Open Crawl > Issues and pick Near-duplicate content. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (medium) and effort (medium), and in the issues CSV under the code near_duplicate. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.