Why do my Moz duplicate content results show me pages with no noticeably similar content?

[rickmic]

Sometimes the "Pages with Duplicate Content" results under Content Issues show pages that, from what I'm able to see or otherwise test, have no duplicate content, save for the same navigation that exists on all of my pages.

For example, a recent issue said that the following pages had duplicate content:
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/html/slider-overlay
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/ufaqs/what-do-i-get-with-my-purchase-of-freezerworks
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/videos/fda-and-freezerworks-2
https://freezerworks.com/index.php/lims-testing-module

Even a side-by-side of the page source in a text comparison tool shows nothing but navigation and scripts used in every page.

Am I not seeing something?

[jasongmcmahon]

This post is deleted!

[jasongmcmahon]

To be honest, if it's on Moz don't sweat about the error message about duplicate content, especially since can see it. However if it on GSC, take action.

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there,

Sam from Moz's Help Team here!

Thanks for writing in — that's an excellent question! Our tool has a 90% tolerance for duplicate content, which means it will flag any content that has 90% of the same code between pages. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text, so often it's a matter of finding the best answer for the duplicate pages in question.

If you use a Similar Page Checker like this one: https://smallseotools.com/similar-sites/ you can see that https://freezerworks.com/index.php/html/slider-overlay and https://freezerworks.com/index.php/ufaqs/what-do-i-get-with-my-purchase-of-freezerworks actually have a similarity of 96%.

There are more in-depth explanations of common answers to duplicate content on this page, if you're curious!: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

I hope this helps but definitely let me know if you have any other questions, or if there's anything else I can help with!

[7thPowerInc]

We had a similar situation and a Moz rep (thanks Samantha) pointed out in the Help material (very close to what she wrote in the earlier post) about the 90% figure. We realized the reason for the message -  because the affected pages had very little content and the page header section and the page footer section (word press site) dominated the page content. We realized the issue could be ignored in our case.