How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search?

What people said

Recommends dan · 2014-09 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Would using a template for a Privacy Policy be considered as duplicate content?”

See this video by Matt Cutts from Google on this: How does required duplicate content (terms and conditions, etc.) affect search? [this video] . John is correct about blocking it from crawlers if you're concerned about it.

Cites danlefree · 2012-10 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?”

Google's Duplicate Content webmaster guide [LINK] defines duplicate content (for purposes of search engine optimization) as "substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar". Google's guide goes on to list the following as examples of duplicate content: Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs Printer-only versions of web pages Penalties Search engines need to penalize some instances of duplicate content that are designed to spam their search index such as: scraper sites [LINK] which copy content wholesa

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2013-07 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Microformats, reviews and duplicate content”

Showing content that you own in a couple places on your site will generally not hurt you. In the worst case, Google will not index one of the two places that content appears. Duplicate content can become an issue that can get your whole site in trouble when You have no content of your own, you are only syndicating content from other sources Much of your content is duplicated across 100s of pages with no other unique content on those pages Google's Matt Cutts just addressed duplicate content for boilerplate such as legal notices [this video] that have to be on lots of pages. He says that he wouldn't stress about duplicate content. Unless your content is spammy or keyword stuffing, then it shouldn'

Cites Max · 2013-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Do the "Contact us" and "Privacy policy" pages affect SEO?”

Google just recently released a video on this exact subject: How does duplicate copy that's legally required (ie Terms & Conditions across multiple offers) affect performance in search? [this video] So the answer from the horses mouth is I wouldn't stress about that.

Cites Marian Popovych · 2013-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Do the "Contact us" and "Privacy policy" pages affect SEO?”

I've read that it could build up your trust with Google, is this true? Yes, that is true. This pages show Google you are ready to hear your visitors and that you have rules of your activity. I've also read that some people said that you should add a noindex tag to your "Privacy policy" page, would this be a good idea? I say this because many websites have similar privacy policies, and I don't want any duplicate content issues. If in short, this is not necessarily. See this [this video]

Cites dan · 2013-09 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How to display Cookie Notification text to users that is ignored by Search Engines?”

As discussed by Matt Cutts here [this video] , legally required content that's duplicated in a site shouldn't be cause for concern. Like copyright notices, privacy statements, or terms & conditions found on most sites, this wouldn't impact SEO. However, you still might not want such a notice to show up in search engine snippets (in the case of thin content, missing description, etc...) or cache - particularly for visitors outside of the E.U. There are some potential ways to block search engines from indexing part of a page, as covered in this [LINK] question (e.g., using JavaScript, AJAX, and iFrames). Since many search engine bots like Google's primarily crawl from the U.S. however, you could se

Cites Stephen Ostermiller · 2013-11 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Can I copy the terms and conditions from a similar site?”

Copying from other sources without permission is copyright infringement and not legal unless: The text is public domain (which wouldn't be in this case) Or you get permission (you could always ask the other site) Or your use of it would be considered "fair use". (changing it and using it on your site would not be fair use) In the case of terms and conditions, there is no good reason to copy from another site. There are many sites that will let you generate your own terms and conditions and then give you permission to use them. I would search for "terms and conditions generator" or something similar. You also tagged your post as "duplicate content". Google was specifically asked if there are

Cites jeffatrackaid · 2014-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “What is Google's policy about separate content on same URLs in mobile and desktop versions?”

Google is smart enough to detect mobile vs. non-mobile sites. And comments specifically that this is not viewed as spam. The more important consideration is to mark your preferred URL as canonical. From Google's WMT: Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include: Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs Printer-only versions of web pages This has been well documented

Cites lucgenti · 2015-06 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “faq content on every page , duplicate content or not ?”

It may "distract" Google when it analyzes your webpages, trying to give them a primary subject. So even if you do some kind of optimization, it may cause some kind of trouble. In a similar situation I've seen footer content on a text widget that appeared in the snippet description of some pages. But it all depends on what's actually your page, so we cannot say anything for sure. Here you have some words about from Matt Cutts on a similar situation [this video] where it says explicitly that Google doesn't penalizes webpages for duplicate content if it's legit content. Anyway: if you need to show that kind of content, just "call" it from a static source, don't copy and paste through all your pages.

Cites adam-asdf · 2017-02 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “How to test for Duplicate Content penalties from Google”

I'm going to go out on a limb here but I think your fears are largely unfounded. My understanding is that Google doesn't actually penalize duplicate content, they just don't rank very well. Think about the Associated Press, if there was a duplicate content "penalty" news outlets that ran AP published stories would get penalized. Or hosting companies...how many have exact copies of the documentation for Apache, cPanel, etc. Here's a Google Webmaster's Video with Matt Cutts [this video] discussing it. What you're describing isn't spam so I think it more likely that they just don't consider a partially translated page to be unique/original/valuable enough to rank it well. Human editing and translati