Just realized my site was flagged for duplicate content from a 2012 blog post

I was digging through my site analytics last month and found a ton of pages getting zero traffic. Turns out, I copied a 200 word section from a blog post I wrote back in 2012 into a new page in 2023. Google saw it as duplicate content and tanked both pages. I ended up rewriting the new page from scratch and adding fresh data. Has anyone else had old posts screw up new content like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_piper13d ago

oh man, that's a bummer but actually Google is pretty smart about that stuff. it's not really "old posts screwing up new content" per se, it's more that you copied a chunk of text verbatim. Google sees exact matches and flags them as duplicate. i had a similar thing happen where i used the same product description from 2015 on a new listing and it got buried. once i rewrote it to be unique, both posts started getting traffic again.

nora53513d ago

Yeah @the_piper is right on, but one small thing - Google actually doesn't penalize for duplicate content anymore, they just pick the best version to show and ignore the rest. So the old post was likely just outranking the new one rather than "screwing it up.