Even though Google put up a blog post about this very thing three years ago, the debate still raged over whether there was a penalty for duplicate content. At the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference last month, a software engineer from Google hopefully put an end to this discussion. Greg Grothaus discussed (1) why webmasters sometimes get confused about this issue, (2) why duplicate content is usually legitimate, (3) the issues that do stem from duplicate content, and (4) how to deal with these issues. In particular, Mr. Grothaus provided two methods to show Google which of several “duplicate” pages you prefer for Google to index. These techniques are not necessary, but otherwise Google will pick one of the pages on its own, and it may not be the page you would have preferred.