Duplicate Content on Website Doesn’t Negate Search Ranking Factor

During Google Search Central SEO office-hour in the last week of January 2021, Muller clarified misconceptions regarding the duplication of content on a website.

Overview:

• Same content on multiple pages of a website does not contribute to the negative ranking of the website.
• A certain amount of duplication is allowed in the case of web content. Google algorithms are optimized to handle such amount of duplication.
• Multiple pages with similar content will not appear in the search index, only one among them will be visible.

There have always been questions around duplicate content and its impact on the ranking factor. Following the doubt, the question was raised in the Google Search Central SEO office-hour in the last week of January 2021. While answering the query John Muller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, clarified that a certain amount of duplication is permitted on webpages of the website; and that do not contribute to the negative ranking of the search page. Further, he confirmed that Google algorithms are designed to handle a certain amount of duplication.

Muller added that if multiple web pages have the same information then the Google algorithm will show one of the pages and not all. This will nowhere lead to negative ranking of the page.

He backed his statement with an example of content on e-Commerce websites. Many online shopping websites share the same content as a result of the same products. And that is the website footer. However, in such cases, Google doesn’t interpret the negative signal as the algorithm crawls through the same product description on various retailer’s sites.