Google's John Mueller stated that duplicate content does not count negatively against a site in search rankings, states.
Multiple pages with similar content are not a big cause of concern for lower ranks in search engines. Google algorithms are smart enough to handle such sites with certain duplications.
Duplication is a factor that most SEOs take very seriously during a site audit. Does it matter? And indeed, till what extent?
Google's John Mueller's stance on Content Duplication
Google's Mueller cleared that it's just a misunderstanding or an over cautiousness. He stated that it's not affecting the overall ranking of any site at all.
If the website's complete content is duplicated and matches other pages, the search engine ranks a single page, but it will not affect its overall ranking.
Yes, it's quite worth mentioning here that page duplication can eat up the crawl budget by bloating a site, but that's a complete another perspective.
If multiple content segments are duplicated all over a website, for instance, footer or header content, Mueller says it's not going to negatively impact the site ranking.
"With that kind of duplicate content, it's not so much that there's a negative score associated with it. It's more that if we find exactly the same information on multiple pages on the web, and someone searches specifically for that piece of information, then we'll try to find the best matching page.
So if you have the same content on multiple pages, then we won't show all of these pages. We'll try to pick one of them and show that. So it's not that there's any negative signal associated with that. In a lot of cases that's kind of normal that you have some amount of shared content across some of the pages."
Mueller gives some common examples to demonstrate the normality of content duplication.
E-commerce is one of the most common part of the SEO game. The content used for online selling websites is mostly common and duplicated. The pages mostly have content similarities with a few differences according to the products.
Google algorithm is effective and understands the possibilities and difficulties. As per the Google algorithm, a description of a similar product sold by another vendor's site will not negatively impact your ranking.
"A really common case for example is with ecommerce. If you have a product, and someone else is selling the same product, or within a website maybe you have a footer that you share across all of your pages and sometimes that's a pretty big footer. Technically that's duplicate content but we can kind of deal with that. So that shouldn't be a problem."
Technically, website footers are eligible as duplicate content, Mueller says, "but that's not a problem when it comes to search rankings either."