Duplicate content is the starring actor in two distinct scenarios, namely on and off site promotion.
On Site Dupe
This occurs when two or more pages on your site are considered similar enough by the search engines that the search engine doesn’t feel the need to include both of them in its index of webpages. And when a page isn’t included in the SE index,
1. It can’t rank for any keyword phrase;
2. It can’t pass on any link juice or PageRank from pages linking to it;
If a page can’t pass link reputation and PR it’s considered a black hole in the website’s internal linking structure and this leads to poor rankings in SERPs. If a lot of your webpages are considered duplicate content by the search engines your entire website is on a sure death course.
Still, for whitehat websites having 1-3 duplicated pieces of content is considered to be well within the acceptable margins.
The majority of online marketers don’t even know they are practicing this “no, no”. And the most exposed types of websites are thin affiliate sites, ecommerce sites, submission sites with few submissions and blogs.
