Google De-Duplicates Search Results Based On Almost Duplicates

Google's John Mueller said Google Search will de-duplicate its search results based on almost duplicates. John said this on Twitter the other day when asked about canonicalizing international URLs.

John wrote "We do de-duplicate based on "almost-duplicates" (I forgot the actual name), so that might be what you're seeing there." I do wonder what the name is for deduplicating "almost duplicates."

Here are those tweets:

We do de-duplicate based on "almost-duplicates" (I forgot the actual name), so that might be what you're seeing there. Also, for someone selling flags, I'm disappointed that your Swiss flag is wrong. Christian. /shakeshead :-))

— 🌽〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉🌽 (@JohnMu) September 21, 2022

AFAIK we do try to pick up on that, but if that's really the only difference: good luck. Also it's often fine to have them as duplicates, we can still show the appropriate URL in search even if it's seen as a duplicate.

— 🌽〈link href=//johnmu.com rel=canonical 〉🌽 (@JohnMu) September 21, 2022

A while back we covered how Google detects near duplicate content.

Forum discussion at Twitter.