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I optimized my links using a .htaccess and made sure there are no duplicate URLs, but what about the content?

For example, if I have on a newsletter widget some text, an author paragraph, and some featured items that repeat on every post, would this be treated as duplicate content by search engines like Google?

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  • It's best if you add a screenshot (not a link to your site however) that demonstrates how much text is the same between posts, and also indicate how that gets added (e.g., through an iframe, complex JavaScript, etc...).
    – dan
    Sep 3, 2014 at 23:25
  • I would add rich snippets based on schema.org to repeating information. Google will notice that the author information is not the same as the article / page content.
    – Kevin
    Sep 5, 2014 at 20:16

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They are not considered duplicate content if they are not the main meat of the page. If you notice this site itself has a lot of "duplicate content" in the form of footers, headers, sidebars, etc.

One way you can bulletproof this risk is by using html5 sematic markup and wrapping the sections in asides, footer and other semantic tags. You can take this a bit further by adding schema.org based meta data in the pages which will let google know exactly what these tid bits of html are.

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Yes, At whatever page the similar content gets displayed, it will consider as duplicate content. Remove the widget if it is still there.

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  • Do you have any evidence for this being the case? Jun 18, 2016 at 15:44
  • Hello Andrew, You can copy the content and past the content in the Google.com search. If your website is index then you will see in the google search all your website pages are showing the similar content. This shows Google crawler is find the same content on all the pages. Jun 20, 2016 at 15:24
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From a technical sense, it is duplicated content. Another word for content that appears on every page on your site is "boilerplate".

Duplicating content internally on your site is a common practice. Pretty much every website does so. Search engines (including Google) do not penalize for having some content on each page that appears on other pages.

Google even says that internally duplicating content will never incur a penalty. If they encounter two pages on your site with the exact same content, the only action they are likely to take is to choose only one of them to index. As long as each page on your site has some paragraphs of unique content in addition to the boilerplate, Google will index that page.

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