I remember seeing an old matt cuts vid... If my memory serves me correctly he implied their was leeway, and some duplicate content was okay in small amounts.


My thoughts?


If its just a small portion of the overall page, then I think should be okay. But I am cautious on this.

Think of the user experience. If a duplicate paragraph is required to make sense out of a post/page or contributes anything of value that is related to that post/page, then there's no need to rewrite it. eCommerce websites still rank even though a major chunk of content is the same.

If I remember right, this was confirmed in Google's Search Quality Rating Guidelines (PDF).

Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original--or best.

The Three Biggest Issues with Duplicate Content

1. Search engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices
2.Search engines don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions
3.Search engines don't know which version(s) to rank for query results

Thanks for the help guys and especially for that PDF!