Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue

[PeaSoupDigital]

Good morning,

Our developers have recently created a new site for our agency. The site is responsive for mobile/tablets.

I've just put the site through Screaming Frog and I've been informed of duplicate H2s. When I've looked at some of the page sources, there are some instances of duplicated H2s and duplicated content. These duplicates don't actually appear on the site, only in the code.

When I asked the development guys about this, they advised this is duplicated because of the code for the responsive site. Will the site be negatively affected because of this? Not everything is duplicated, which leads me to believe it probably could have been designed better... but I'm no developer so don't know for sure.

I've checked the code for other responsive sites and no duplicates can be found.

Thanks in advance,

Lewis

[RyanPurkey]

Yes. That's a good sign. GWT Fetch and Render would also show you how it's being handled. From your example you've definitely got multiple H2 tags as you're using them to subtitle subsections of the page, but none of them are duplicating. This seems to fall in line with Google's own practice: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.mx/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html (an example of them looking at their own site).  Cheers!

[PeaSoupDigital]

Thanks for the responses! I've tried a cached version and nothing appears to be duplicated, so hopefully all's well.

I should have probably given an example URL: www.peasoupdigital.co.uk/services/ppc - according to the source, this page has two H2s...

Cheers,

Lewis

[RyanPurkey]

Like Hutch says, chances are Screaming Frog is doing a straight read of those pages without factoring in CSS rules for non display of the irrelevant content per device. To double check you could pull up Google's cached version of your pages and see what they're displaying there.  Cheers!

[Hutch42]

While it is odd that the code has the content multiple times for the responsive, Google is very good at "seeing" what is being displayed (which is why all of the old keyword stuffing tactics don't work) so from that standpoint you should be fine.