What is duplicate content? What is article spinning?

Duplicate content is one of the most common problems facing new websites and news portals. In this guide we explain what copied content is and how it damages your search visibility.

What is duplicate content?

Duplicate content refers to content that already exists on your own site, or on another website already indexed by search engines, being copied and reused on your pages.

Google can identify the content on your website with ease, which means it detects copied content just as easily. Here is a quick way to test for it.

How to test for copied content

Copy a passage from your content, then search for it on Google. If that passage is being used on other websites, Google will show you exactly where.

Example screenshot of duplicate content in search results:

You can also run a dedicated duplicate content check to confirm whether your pages contain copied material.

Duplicate content penalties

Google can respond to duplicate content with more than one type of penalty. The severity depends largely on how much of the content is copied and how deceptive the intent appears, which is why the consequences of publishing copied content vary. The main penalty categories are:

• Duplicate content penalty
• Google bombing penalty
• Sandbox penalty
• Cloaking penalty
• Manual spam action

Recovery methods differ depending on the penalty. One solution, however, applies to all of them: rewrite the affected pages with original content and remove every copied passage across your entire site.

What is a spun article? What does spinning mean?

Article spinning means taking a base article and replacing its key words with synonyms, a shortcut typically used by teams that run multiple websites and lack the time for content production. One article can be spun into several variations this way.

An important note: article spinning should be the last option you consider. With its recent updates, Google evaluates content by the information it actually delivers, and its synonym detection has become remarkably strict. We recommend investing in original content and treating spun articles as a final fallback, not a strategy.