Whilst working in the SEO industry for a few years, it has been common for the term “duplicate content penalty” to be banded about in SEO circles. Technically the phrase is inaccurate. There is no search engine penalty for duplicate content, however it is not something you should strive to have plenty of on your website.

As long as the internet has been around, duplicate content has existed and it is something that can’t really be avoided. This isn’t something to lose a lot of sleep over however. Your website won’t get penalised but search engines like Google will simply filter out the duplicate pages. “Filter” is the key word here. Search engines strive to index and show as much unique, relevant content as possible. It is their job to do this. Duplicate content is a problem for search engines but they deal with it by applying filters which attempt to remove any pages that display information they already know about.

An example of the filter is having similar content for two similar products on a site. You won’t get penalised for this however you may have to be content with the fact that only one of these products is shown by Google, the other being “filtered”.