Does duplicate content affect my site’s SEO?
You may have heard that copying content either within your own site, or from someone else’s site, can cause your site to lose Google points. Is that true? Well, yes and no. If it’s done maliciously (like you copy a whole site because you can’t be bothered to create your own and want to steal their ideas), then yes, it will, but that’s rare.
What’s more likely to happen is that Google will get confused and may not list the right content. This can happen especially if you syndicate your content, so when someone searches for that content Google shows a syndication site rather than your site.
If you want to know more on the subject, and how to go about fixing it, check out Google’s own guidelines here –