“But for the most part, duplicate content is not really treated as spam.,” he said. “It’s just treated as something that we need to cluster appropriately. We need to make sure that it ranks correctly, but duplicate content does happen. Now, that said, it’s certainly the case that if you do nothing but duplicate content, and you’re doing in in abusive, deceptive or malicious or a manipulative way, we do reserve the right to take action on spam.”
He mentions that someone on Twitter was asking how to do an RSS autoblog to a blog site, and not have that be viewed as spam.
“The problem is that if you are automatically generating stuff that’s coming from nothing but an RSS feed, you’re not adding a lot of value,” said Cutts. “So that duplicate content might be a little more likely to be viewed as spam. But if you’re just making a regular website, and you’re worried about whether you have something on the .com and the .co.uk, or you might have two versions of your Terms and Conditions – an older version and a newer version – or something like that. That sort of duplicate content happens all the time on the web, and I really wouldn’t get stressed out about the notion that you might have a little bit of duplicate content. As long as you’re not trying to massively copy for every city and every state in the entire United States, show the same boiler plate text….for the most part, you should be in very good shape, and not really have to worry about it.”