Penalty for duplicate content on the same website?

[seoman10]

Is it possible to get a penalty for duplicate content on the same website?

I have a old custom-built site with a large number of filters that are pre-generated for speed. Basically the only difference is the meta title and H1 tag, with a few text differences here and there.

Obviously I could no-follow all the filter links but it would take an enormous amount of work.

The site is performing well in the search.

I'm trying to decide whether if there is a risk of a penalty, if not I'm loath to do anything in case it causes other issues.

[paupastorlopez]

Hi seoman10,

there is no penalty for duplicated content but rankings can be impacted negatively because of the duplicated content and your web may have a worst performance on Google.

This is because Google will waste many time searching in all your similar content to decide which page to show in the search results, wasting also your "crawl budget", and probably will also divide the authority between more than one of the similar pages, losing authority in this process.

Also, Google may choose to show in the search results a filter version of the page that is not your preferred one.

I recommend you to use canonicals to solve this problem, pointing all the filter versions of the page with canonical to the non-filter one.

Hope that helps

Good luck!

[KaneJamison]

It wouldn't cause a literal penalty from Google, however, yes, it can hurt your site's rankings.

It sounds like those filters use URL parameters? If so it's possible for all parameterized URLs to be controlled or use canonical tags to indicate duplicate content.

What types of filters are these? EG what is changing on the page when you select the filters? Is this like an ecommerce category experience where you're filtering product listings?

[ibalachandar]

Your ranking will be decreased. It is better to use canonical URL to avoid duplicate contents in your website.