Cutts took on the subject once again this week. This time, it was in response to this question:
How does Google handle duplicate content and what negative effects can it have on rankings from an SEO perspective?
It’s important to realize that if you look at content on the web, something like 25 or 30 percent of all of the web’s content is duplicate content,” said Cutts. “There’s man page for Linux, you know, all those sorts of things. So duplicate content does happen. People will quote a paragraph of a blog, and then link to the blog. That sort of thing. So it’s not the case that every single time there’s duplicate content, it’s spam. If we made that assumption, the changes that happened as a result would end up, probably, hurting our search quality rather than helping our search quality.”
“So the fact is, Google looks for duplicate content and where we can find it, we often try to group it all together and treat it as if it’s one piece of content,” he continued. “So most of the time, suppose we’re starting to return a set of search results, and we’ve got two pages that are actually kind of identical. Typically we would say, “Ok, you know what? Rather than show both of those pages (since they’re duplicates) let’s just show one of those pages, and we’ll crowd the other result out.’ And if you get to the bottom of the search results, and you really want to do an exhaustive search, you can change the filtering so that you can say, okay, I want to see every singe page, and then you’d see that other page.”