The fix, in one snippet
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/guides/running-shoes">Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
We hash the first six hundred meaningful words of each page's body text, after removing markup and stop words, and group pages whose hashes match. An exact match at that length means the visible prose is the same, not merely similar.
Shared headers, navigation and footers are included in the text we hash, so pages with almost no unique content of their own are the ones most likely to collide. That is by design: it is exactly the case worth knowing about.
Why it matters
Duplicate content is not penalised in the way the phrase suggests, but it does force a choice. The engine picks one URL to index and discards the others, and the one it picks may not be the one you promote, link to or advertise.
Signals split in the meantime. Links, shares and engagement spread across the duplicates, so the surviving URL ranks with a fraction of the authority the content earned.
The usual causes are structural: a page reachable through several category paths, a printer-friendly variant, a staging domain left crawlable, or session and tracking parameters generating endless distinct URLs for one document.
How to fix it
Pick one URL per piece of content and make everything else point at it. A canonical link is enough when both versions must stay reachable:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/guides/running-shoes">Where a duplicate has no reason to exist, redirect it permanently instead, which consolidates the signals rather than merely declaring a preference. For parameter-generated duplicates, strip tracking parameters server-side before rendering, and make sure the canonical never includes them.
If the duplication is across domains, the canonical must be absolute and cross-domain, and the source site has to agree to carry it.
Where this fits
Duplicate body content is check 1 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
What fixing this still leaves open
Duplicate body content closes one route in. Immediately below it: Page title missing, where the title element is the headline of every search result and the label on every browser tab; Duplicate titles across pages, where two pages with the same title compete for the same queries and give searchers no way to tell them apart; H1 missing, where the H1 is the page's visible headline.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Duplicate body content (high severity)
Scanner check id: seo-duplicate-contentThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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