Google’s Matt Cutts: Duplicate Content Won’t Hurt You, Unless It Is Spammy

Duplicate content is a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) space; heck, we even have a category devoted to the topic. But should we worry about it? Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said he wouldn’t stress about it — that is, unless it is spammy duplicate content.

In a video posted today, Matt Cutts answers, “How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search?”

Matt Cutts said twice that you should not stress about it, in the worse non-spammy case, Google may just ignore the duplicate content. Matt said in the video, “I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing.”

Google has said time and time again, duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. Google doesn’t want to show the same content to searchers for the same query; they do like to diversify the results to their searchers.

To learn more on this topic, see our duplicate content section.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.