Why Is Having Duplicate Content an Issue for SEO Growth?
Duplicate content can slow SEO growth because search engines may find multiple pages with the same or very similar content and struggle to decide which URL should rank. This can split ranking signals, dilute backlink value, waste crawl budget, and cause Google to show a different page than the one you intended.
That is why having duplicate content is an issue for SEO: it creates a visibility problem, not usually a direct manual penalty. Google often filters out similar pages and selects a single canonical version, which means the other versions may receive little or no organic traffic.