Web content duplication is the major concern of most of the webmasters today. While some of them consider duplicating the content as a time saver, the fact is that duplicate content can destroy your search engine rankings. The punishment for content duplication is that, your web page won’t be indexed by the search engines no matter what effective SEO strategy that you do for the page. Duplicate content in Google’s point of view According to Google, duplicate content can be categorized in to two types:Within your domain duplicate content – As the title indicates, this category refers to the exacting content that shows off in more than one page of your own websiteCross domain duplicate content – This category includes exacting content across various other external sites When it comes to the first category it’s on your hands to avoid duplicate content to get crawled by Google. One of the tips provided by Google to avoid the 1st scenario is the use of the sitemap file. You should include the preferred version of the URL in the sitemap so that Google can index the particular page of your preferenceIn the second case, Ie. When some one steals your content and displays it in his website, you will have to monetize it. However, when Google comes across such duplicate content across different webpages, the Google bots search for various signals and effectively identify the original webpage. According to Google you need not seriously worry about your content duplicated by others coz Google can effectively identify them and avoid those pages from indexing. As said in official Google Webmaster blog, “in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”