Will one line of duplicate content drag down my landing page?
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I am using copyscape to check for duplicate content on my landing pages. I found three sites that have the exact same sentence as mine, on a page that I rank well for on one of two key terms related to the product. The sentence is not essential to my product page. Do I risk losing page one rank on a key search term when I remove that sentence on my site, in hopes of possibly improving the page on the second key search term?
Do I leave it alone? This is an older "template" site with very little that I can do SEO-wise, and I have managed to get a few key prodcut landing pages on page one of Google. It has seen a drop in rank on many landing pages post-panda, and I'm doing my best to clean up what I can. Do I leave well enough alone for a page one rank on one term, or swap out that sentence in hopes of getting better rank on two keywords?
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Completely agree with Ryan - assuming it's not the first sentence or an extremely short article you're absolutely fine.
Duplicate lines are very common - most notably as a quote (think how many times you see this in news publications).
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I agree with Ryan.
No. It's not going to hurt you.
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Generally speaking, one line of duplicate content will not negatively impact the SERP performance of a web page.
A couple instances where a page could be affected:
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the duplicated sentence is the first sentence of the article
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the article is very short (i.e. <100 words)
It is common practice for a single sentence to be duplicated elsewhere.
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