Is duplicate content harmful? Example from on my site

[Brocberry]

I'm not talking about content copied from another site but content unique to a site being used on several pages.

I have a delivery tab that has precisely the same content as another product page. This content is on four product pages and the dedicated delivery page.

Thanks

[anthonydnelson]

One possible option would be to pull-in the duplicate content (shipping info) via an iframe on every page, so the content doesn't actually live on the page.

That being said, you have a lot of unique content on each page, and I don't think the duplicated content on these pages would be a problem.

[Brocberry]

That's the thing, these are the worst performing pages and I'm exploring possible reasons.

[Matthew_Edgar]

If the duplicated content is only part of the overall page, and the rest of the page is basically unique and different, I wouldn't worry too much. That said, watch rankings and traffic to these pages. If it seems to be lower than expected or it seems that it isn't growing as much as other parts of the site you might want to make it more unique.

[Brocberry]

Hi Matthew

They aren't duplicated pages but they contain duplicate content.

Most of the content on the four product pages is unique, but each page has duplicate delivery information in a tab.

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi,

In general, yes, duplicate content is not good and can be harmful to your site. There are many reasons why this is true, but in terms of search it can be bad because it can divide the focus.

Let's say those four pages that are duplicated on your site are really important pages. You want those pages to rank and get traffic. By having duplicate content, you are dividing the focus across multiple pages. You'll have links going to all those pages, instead of all those links going to one page (internal and external). The same is true of social shares (to whatever extent that influences search). This makes your job that much harder to optimize those pages because you are dividing the focus across all four pages when really you should put all the focus behind one page.

Obviously, there are other issues beyond search. Duplicated pages can be bad for usability and can be a sign of an architecture that needs to be re-worked.

Hope that helps.