It seems to be a very simple question this time on the questionary video of Matt Cutts in Google Webmaster Help. The question is about the sites performance in regards with the required Duplicate Contents on a site. The Question was from New York, which goes like this,
“How does duplicate copy that’s legally required (ie Terms & Conditions across multiple offers) affect performance in search?”
Though this seems to be a simple question, Matt Cutts wants to make it clear since there was a follow up comment towards this question which says that people in financial industry has doubts on this and wants it to be cleared.
The one word simple answer for this question is NO. He says that, when it comes to legal practices, like disclaimers, terms and conditions, if the content is spammy or duplicated or keyword stuffing or anything that related to quality issue, then there are possibilities for the manual or algorithmic actions on the site. But still even if it seems like duplicated content for legally required pages, Google will not count on it and will not affect a site, unless google finds it to be spammy.
He again says that, Google understands that there are various places across the web that needs to have various disclaimers, terms and conditions and so on. So it’s the sort of thing where if Google did not rank that stuff well, then that would probably hurt overall search quality. So Matt Cutts says that, he wouldn’t stress about it.
So if your required duplicated content page is not spammy and if you are sure that your page follows the Google quality guidelines then you don’t need to worry about it.