How do you handle duplicate content issues across different domains?

Duplicate content can arise in a few different ways: 1. You're sourcing products from different suppliers and using the exact Product name and descriptions they've provided. If your competitors are doing the same, there WILL be duplicate content issues. 2. You're creating unique products for your Brand but using the same descriptions for the products or specific sections or USPs, across the board. 3. Syndicating content, meaning, publishing the same content on your site, and on other platforms such as Medium, LinkedIn etc. for wider reach. 4. Multiple instances of the same content being discovered by Google algorithms due to filtered URLs not being properly handled.

From conversations with Google engineers, there is no "penalty" for duplicate content, especially across domains. Google is good about listing the content originator and filtering out URLs that copy the content verbtim. In fact, having a website curate sections of a webpage could increase the probability of earning a Featured Snippet (or the coveted "Position Zero") in search engine results; especially if there is question in a subheading followed by the answer to that question. Duplicate content within your own website can eat up crawl budget, but with the help of canonical tags, meta robots tags, and when necessary, the robots.txt file, a webmaster can make it easier for Google to figure out which page is the most helpful to searchers.

Duplicate content ONLY matters if your content is: 1. Spammy/Keyword stuffed 2. Hasn't been assigned proper attribution (in case of syndication) 3. You've sourced products, widely available on the market, and are trying to rank number 1 while using a generic, cookie-cutter copy for the description. Some level of duplicate content is normal on most sites (think Navigation menu, Footer) and is nothing to worry about. In case of duplicate content due to filtered URLs – Google algorithms are able to ascertain the best URL version to show to users in search. That being said, URLs should still be handled efficiently using proper canonical tags.

I disagree for the most part. It's common for e-commerce websites to have similar pages based on filtering and refinements, and the visitor rarely knows or cares. There is the issue of crawl budget and keeping things simple for web crawlers to navigate, which can be mitigated via canonical tags, meta robots tags, and the robots.txt file, but having duplicate content is nothing to worry about unless you experience ranking issues on a goal URL you are optimizing.

A simple, free way to check for duplicate content is to use Google search operators. By copying a couple of random sentences from body content and entering them into Google with quotation marks around them, Google will search for exact matches. This way you can see pages on your site (and possibly others) that are using that exact text.

Google Alerts are also a great way to monitor who is curating your content, and making sure they are giving you credit and not just plagiarizing your content.