Issue: Exact Duplicates High

What this means

Two or more pages produce the exact same text content after stripping boilerplate. This is especially common in programmatic SEO setups where a template fails to inject unique data for certain entries. The JSON field is exact_duplicates.

Detection condition

Triggered when SimilarityKind == "exact". SEODiff computes text similarity using SimHash and flags 100% matches. The similarity threshold for near-duplicates is configurable (default 92%), but exact duplicates always count as an issue regardless of information gain score.

Impact on scores

Severity weight: 12. Deductions: −15 on Indexability, −18 on Content score, plus an additional −10 per duplicate cluster. Search engines may choose to index only one version, effectively wasting all other duplicate pages.

Common causes

• Empty template variables: CMS or pSEO template renders with null/empty data, producing identical fallback content.
• URL variants: Same content served at /page, /page/, /Page without canonicalization.
• Pagination issues: Page 1 content duplicated at the base URL.
• Filter/sort parameters: Product listing pages with identical content for different filter combinations.

How to fix

1. Identify the duplicate clusters in your SEODiff report.
2. If caused by empty data: ensure every page has unique, substantive content or return 404 for entries with no data.
3. If caused by URL variants: add proper canonical tags pointing to the preferred URL.
4. If caused by parameters: use rel="canonical" to point parameter URLs back to the clean URL.
5. For pSEO: add guard logic to check if the template data is empty/identical before publishing.