Why not to duplicate content
It's natural to want to make sure your website's audience has everything at their fingertips. If students in your unit might need info about shared resources like McGill residences, wellness, or studying abroad, why not include that on your site?
The instinct is good, but when the same information gets copied across multiple McGill websites, it quickly creates problems.
Details get out of sync. Outdated pages linger. People Googling a question have to sift through ten different answers from ten different McGill pages. And with more people using AI to find info, it's even easier for one piece of outdated content to fuel misinformation.
What the data says about how our users find information
As a faculty site manager, you might picture a student with a question opening your site's homepage and clicking through your lovingly designed menu structure until they find the answer.
But research tells us that most McGill website visitors don't navigate this way—93% type their question into Google, look at the first few results, and go straight to the most relevant-looking page
Less is more
If you put everything your audience might need directly on your site, your content will quickly balloon out of control. This does more harm than good:
- Those extra words and pages get in the way of your site's main purpose: providing users with the information you manage!
- Duplicate content adds to site managers' maintenance burden, taking up resources better spent elsewhere.
- If your website doesn't present your information clearly, other site managers may be tempted to reproduce parts of your content on their own sites. It's a vicious cycle!
What to do instead
Instead of duplicating existing info on your site, link directly to the authoritative source and limit accompanying text to a short, general, evergreen blurb.
- Start with a content audit to identify duplicate content.
- Locate the original source of that information and note the url.
- Replace duplicate content, using tools like call to action blocks or list blocks to link to information that lives on other sites. For course or program information, use short tags to syndicate content from the Course Catalogue, so that it updates automatically.
This strategy keeps your site lean, accurate, and user-friendly—while making sure visitors to your site can find what they need.
Collaborate and share
Notice something missing from the source information? Instead of duplicating the content on your own site with the additions relevant to your audience, work with the managers of the other site to update their page. Not only will this better serve your audience, it will improve the source site for all users!
If you're not sure who to contact to request a change, use the WMS users database to look up the site admin and/or managers for any McGill website (requires a VPN connection if off-campus).
Cutting duplicate content from our sites ensures the most up-to-date, relevant webpages come up first in AI tools and search engines. This makes it easy for our audiences to find what they're looking for.
By cutting duplicate content from our sites, it will ensure the most up-to-date, relevant webpages come up first in search engines and inform AI tools, making it easy for our audiences to find what they're looking for.
