What Is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is content that is a replicate of content from another website or webpage within a website.

Why Is Duplicate Content Bad For SEO?

Duplicating content from another source or webpage can hurt your SEO performance for many reasons including:

Backlink Dilution: If the same content is seen across many URLs within a sitemap, both URLs may attract backlinks and in short both pages would most likely start to compete to rank for the same keyword.
Wastes Crawl Budget: Google finds new information on the internet through crawling. Which essentially means it follows links from existing pages to new pages on a website. Google also recrawls pages to see if there have been any changes. Having duplicate content on a website creates more work for Google and effects the speed at which Google could be crawling other pages on your website with unique content.
Scraped or Syndicated Content Outranking Your Website: From time to time, you might see another website republish content from your website. This is known as syndication. Other times, websites may scrape your content and republish it without your permission. In both scenarios, it is classed as duplicate content. However the key problem is when the content is scraped and published without technical implementation.