Duplicate content refers to the condition where identical or very similar content is present on multiple pages within a website. This can happen unintentionally, for example due to technical problems or incorrect links, or intentionally in order to generate more traffic on different pages of the website.

However, duplicate content can have a negative impact on search engine optimisation (SEO), as search engines such as Google have difficulty identifying and indexing the most relevant version of the content. This can result in the content being less visible in search results or a page being removed from the index altogether.

To address duplicate content issues, webmasters and content creators should take care to create unique and valuable content for each page of the website and use technical solutions such as 301 redirects, canonical tags or meta robots tags to help search engines identify the correct version of content.