Is Google penalty for duplicated content a myth?

[TheVinous]

So far, I thought you will receive a penalty for duplicated content, but I ran into a MOZ article this week and actually it suggests the following:

You won't receive penalties from Google for the duplicated content, but it can affect your traffic, because Google may consider a duplication as the origin (for example if the site has a higher DA or more traffic) and in this case, this duplication will be shown in the search results as well. This would also mean that Google has an algorithm to choose the origin of non-handled duplications and 301 redirects or canonical URLs only help this algorithm to find the right source.

What do you think about this topic? If this is true, what kind of parameters should matter for this algorithm?

The article can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content

[GunitofSEO]

Duplicate content is not an automatic algorithmic penalty in Google's ranking algorithms BUT it can cause issues which can impact on your SEO performance (e.g. impacts on crawl budget/content quality signals/identifying canonical URL from a set of duplicate documents etc.).

I suggest reading this as it was very useful for me -->

https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/duplicate-content-problems/

I hope this was of help.

[PaulHoule]

To some extent any effective web search engine has to have a duplicate filter. This was even true of a search engine I built for an academic library that had 80 web sites.

For a number of reasons, content gets duplicated across web pages, even if people are disciplined. Since the query (x) document ranking is going to be the same for identical documents, these will rank out the same and form a "plug" of identical results that displace other results.

What exactly Google does, I don't know. I know if they didn't do anything about dupes, Google would be so bad you wouldn't use it.