the practice of making

TLDR: ‘Duplicate content‘ is NOT mentioned **once** in the recently published Search Quality Raters Guidelines. ‘Copied content’, is.

Semantics aside, duplicate content is evidently treated differently by Google than copied content, with the difference being the INTENT and nature of the duplicated text.

Duplicated content is often not manipulative and is commonplace on many websites and often free from malicious intent. Copied content can often be penalised algorithmically or manually. Duplicate content is not penalised, but this is often not an optimal set-up for pages, either. Be VERY careful ‘spinning’ ‘copied’ text to make it unique!

Google clearly says that the practice of making your text more ‘unique’, using low-quality techniques like adding synonyms and related words is:

QUOTE: “probably more counter productive than actually helping your website” John Mueller, Google

If you need help identifying if any problematic content is on your website, our SEO audit can give you answers. View SEO service prices.

If you are doing SEO yourself, read on, as I attempt to break down a common SEO misunderstanding.

UPDATE: