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Johannes Müller from Google has taken the horror of duplicate content away. Duplicate content should not necessarily be problematic and can only be completely avoided in a few cases.
If one deals with SEO, one hears and reads again and again that it is imperative to avoid duplicate content. It is said to be downright hated by Google and massively damage the hard-earned rankings of a website. In one Google Webmaster Hangout Johannes Müller has now taken the horror of duplicate content on different URLs.
Duplicate content is rarely completely avoidable
When asked by a user whether a category page counts as duplicate content when it is indexed on Google, Johannes Müller answered no in the Google Webmaster Hangout. He explained that it is not necessarily negative and leads to the removal of the page from the index if Google classifies pages or parts of pages as duplicate content. Rather, it is so that every website has a certain amount of duplicate content and it is almost impossible to make each page unique. Google is also quite capable of recognizing which page most closely matches a search query. Duplicate content should therefore be unproblematic in most cases.
Unique content instead of duplicate content
The fact that duplicate content should be unproblematic in most cases is not a free ticket to randomly copying content from third-party content for your own web project. In the Google Webmaster Hangout, Müller referred to duplicate content within a web project. If, on the other hand, identical content is available on different domains, Google will most likely upgrade the page in the rankings that the search engine believes is more relevant. Website operators should therefore only rely on unique content.
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