Duplicate content
Substantively identical or near-identical content available at more than one URL, within a site or across sites.
AlgorithmsCopied content
Scraped content
Republishing content taken from other sites with no original value added; a spam policy violation and a common source of duplicate-content confusion.
In full
Google's policy names copying and republishing, copying with trivial modification such as synonym substitution, embedding others' feeds without adding value, and mirroring whole sites. Scrapers occasionally outrank originals when the original is poorly indexed or slow to be crawled, which is what the original content systems and Google's canonical selection are meant to prevent. Publishers can also file DMCA removal requests.
Example
A scraper mirrors a niche blog within minutes of publication; the original's faster indexing and stronger link profile keep it ranking.
Related terms
Google spam policies
Google's documented list of behaviours that can cause lower rankings or removal, covering cloaking, doorways, hacked content, keyword…
Canonicalization
The process by which a search engine groups duplicate or near-duplicate URLs into a cluster and picks one representative URL to index and…
Negative SEO
Attempts to damage a competitor's rankings, typically by pointing spam links at their site, scraping their content, or fabricating removal…
Content syndication
Republishing the same content on third-party sites for reach; without correct canonicalisation it creates duplicates that can outrank the…