Duplicate Content only an Issue on a Huge Scale?

[Todoist]

To what extent is duplicate content an issue? We have a support forum with some duplicate content because users ask the same questions. The Moz reports we receive highlights our duplicate content and page title for our support forum as a "big" issue.

I'm unsure to what extent it harms our SEO, and making the support section non-crawable would impair our level of support. It would be nice to know for sure if we should be concerned about this, and if yes, how can we do it differently?

Thanks, I appreciate you help.

-Allan

[Todoist]

Thanks a million guys, very helpful information.

All the best,

Allan

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Allan,

This is a typical issue with most of the forums out there and there is nothing that you should be worried about and leave it to the search engines to handle it. Moreover, the duplicate content itself cannot harm you or fetch you a penalty from a search engine like Google. Its the intent behind that causes the actual harm and potentially more dangerous.

Having that said, it does not mean you should engage in content duplication and think you are safe. You should stay away from any or all the deliberate or intentional content duplication with an intent to manipulate rankings. Content duplication when it comes to forums is very common thing and search engines are sensible enough in this regard.

Here is what Google has to say in this regard:

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results."

For more: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi.

[Ophelie]

I'm not certain that this kind of duplicate content harms your SEO, but I can tell you what my company did to mitigate this kind of duplicate questions.

We merged threads When questions are exactly the same, we just merge them into one thread. There's no point in having multiple threads when the answer is going to be the same, and having multiple answers in one thread is much more helpful to whoever needs this information in the future

We pre-empted the question with a support or FAQ page
This ended up being a huge part of our help page strategy. When we noticed that people were asking the same question several times, we we would create a new support page with in-depth answers to solve that problem, and suggest that users read this related page before posting their question

We got rid of the forum... Right now, we don't have a public help forum (though this is something we'll likely open up again in the future, when we have more eyes to dedicate to monitoring the forum!), so what we ended up with is a bunch of in-depth help articles, as well as close monitoring of which popular search strings are not turning up good results, and which questions are popping up very frequently in our support queue.

I hope someone else can come along and answer the duplicate content part of your question, because I would love to know as well!