Substantially identical or near-identical content that appears at more than one URL, either within the same site or across different domains. Search engines don’t penalize duplicate content by default, but they do have to pick one version to rank and may split signals — or waste crawl budget — across the copies. Common causes include URL parameters, HTTP/HTTPS or www/non-www variants, staging environments left indexed, and syndicated articles. See duplicate content (technical SEO) and fixing duplicate content in WordPress.
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