Will Google Penalize Websites for Having Duplicate Content?

No, Google doesn’t directly penalize websites for having duplicate content, but it can still negatively affect your SEO. It can negatively impact your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and ranking in a few ways:

• Wasting Crawl Budget: Google crawls your website to understand its content and index it in search results. If your website has a lot of duplicate content, Google might spend more time crawling these duplicate pages instead of discovering and indexing your unique content. This can be inefficient and prevent valuable pages from being properly indexed.
• Content Cannibalization: When multiple pages on your website have very similar content targeting the same keywords, it can lead to “content cannibalization.” This confuses Google about which page is the most relevant for a specific search query, potentially lowering the ranking of all involved pages.
• Negative User Experience: Duplicate content can create a poor user experience. Users might land on a duplicate page expecting unique information, leading to frustration and potentially increasing bounce rates (the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page).

Therefore, while not a direct penalty, duplicate content can hinder your website’s SEO performance. It’s generally recommended to avoid duplicate content by creating unique and valuable content for each page on your website. If you do have unavoidable duplicate content, you can use techniques like canonicalization to tell Google which page is the “original” version.