It’s without a doubt of critical importance to pay close attention to duplicate content on your website. One of the things Google particularly and other search engines pay strong attention to is the uniqueness of content shared on the web. From a user perspective, spammy results or duplicate instances for that matter are redundant. Something that Google focuses strongly upon and attempts to filter out those duplicates. Website owners commonly ask themselves the question, “How will duplicate content affect my SEO performance?”
Like anything else in the SEO world, there’s an exception to the rule. Small portions of duplicate content are not necessarily detrimental to overall SEO performance. In a previous video, Google’s Matt Cutts stated that 25-30 percent of the web content is technically considered duplicate.
With that being said, it’s important to walk a fine line in truly understanding how much duplicate content is actually allowed. For instance, quoting a piece of text from an external resource will not be penalized in the eyes of Google. From a semantic search standpoint the search engine will utilize its sophisticated algorithm to help establish a connection with the original source and therefore will not place point against your website. In another scenario, say there’s two alike pages or duplicate down to the every sentence and word. Google will attempt to index these pages but first before doing so will attempt to establish a connection between both prior to choosing one over the other. In an ideal world, you’ll definitely want to use a canonical url especially if two pages are identical to each other. Point being here is that Google will not penalize you for duplicate content if certain canonical urls slip thru the cracks.
Duplicate content will happen from time to time. Chances are quite unintentionally as well. As long as it’s not in extreme quantities where it’s flooding the SERPs with duplicates then Google will not penalize website owners for certain acts of carelessness. At the end of the day though, duplicate content is treated at the discretion of Google and ultimately the search engine shall make the final call when it comes to indexing within the SERPs.