A surprising number of small business sites we inherit have a service page lifted almost word for word from a competitor in another state. Usually it wasn’t malice. Someone needed words fast, found a page that sounded professional and changed the business name.
It’s an understandable shortcut. It’s also one that works against you.
First, the myth
There’s no general “duplicate content penalty” that wipes your site out because two paragraphs match another page. Google’s documentation on duplicate URLs treats most duplication as a housekeeping issue: Google groups similar pages and picks one version to show.
That’s exactly the problem, though. When your page and a competitor’s page say the same thing, Google shows one of them. It usually won’t be the copy. And if the copying is deliberate and widespread, Google’s spam policies on scraped content apply, which covers republishing other people’s content, including lightly reworded versions, without adding anything of value.
So the real cost isn’t a penalty. It’s that the page becomes invisible, and you’ve lost the chance to say anything that makes you the obvious choice.
What counts as duplicate content
On small business sites, it usually turns up in four ways.
Copied competitor text. The service page, the “about us” or the FAQ borrowed from another business. Besides SEO, this is a copyright problem: the other business owns those words.
Supplier and manufacturer text. Product descriptions pasted from the supplier’s catalogue onto your online shop. Every other stockist has done the same, so there are dozens of identical pages.
Your own near-identical pages. The classic is location pages: “Plumber Ballina”, “Plumber Lennox Head”, “Plumber Alstonville”, all the same text with the town swapped.
Technical duplicates. The same page reachable at several addresses: with and without www, with tracking codes on the end, or a product sitting in two categories. This is the least harmful kind and mostly a setup issue.
A worked example
This is the kind of supplier text we see on retail sites all the time, for an imaginary heat pump:
The AquaTherm 270L heat pump delivers outstanding energy efficiency with advanced technology. Featuring a durable enamel-lined tank and intelligent controls, it is the perfect choice for modern homes.
Nothing in it is wrong. Nothing in it is useful either, and it’s identical on every stockist’s site.
And a rewrite from the point of view of an installer who actually fits them:
We fit the AquaTherm 270L in a lot of three and four-bedroom homes around Ballina. It’s quieter than most heat pumps we install, which matters if it’s going near a bedroom window. In coastal suburbs we recommend the corrosion-resistant casing. Installation usually takes half a day, and the existing electric tank can be removed on the same visit.
Same product, but now the page answers what a buyer wants to know: will it suit my house, will it annoy the neighbours, what’s the job involve. No other site has that text, because no other business has that experience.
You don’t have to do this for every product. Rewrite your 20 best sellers first and leave the long tail until later.
Fixing each type
Copied competitor or template text
Rewrite it from scratch, from your own experience. The quickest method we’ve found is to talk it through: record yourself explaining the service as you would to a customer on the phone, then tidy the transcript. Our guide to getting website content written has more ways to break through the blank page.
Supplier descriptions
Keep the specifications (sizes, ratings, materials), since those are facts. Rewrite the description around who it suits, what you’ve learned from selling or fitting it, and what customers ask about.
Location pages
Only create a page for an area if you have something genuinely different to say: jobs you’ve done there, local conditions, how you cover it. Otherwise, one strong service page listing the areas you serve is better than ten thin copies. Merge weak pages into one and redirect the old addresses.
Technical duplicates
These are mostly fixed in setup:
- Make sure your site redirects to one version (https, with or without www)
- Use a canonical tag on each page pointing to its preferred address. WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math add self-referencing canonicals by default.
- Use permanent redirects when retiring a duplicate page. Google lists redirects as the strongest signal for which version is canonical.
How to check your own site
Copy a distinctive sentence from one of your pages and search for it in Google inside quote marks. If other sites come up with the same sentence, you’ve found a duplicate. Do this for your homepage, your top three service pages and a few products.
Then check your own pages against each other. If you can’t explain in one sentence how two of your pages differ, they probably shouldn’t both exist. Linking between pages that say the same thing won’t help either, as our guide on internal linking explains.
The page to check today
Find the one page on your site that matters most and check whether any of its text exists elsewhere. If it does, rewrite that page first. Original words on one important page do more than a hundred lightly reworded ones.
When we build a site through our web design service, we write or rework the copy so it’s yours. If an existing site needs a content audit, that sits under our SEO work.