Avoiding duplicate content is key for SEO beginners for several reasons:

Confusion for Search Engines: When the same content appears in multiple places, search engines struggle to determine which version to show in search results. This confusion might lead them to index none of the versions, dilute the perceived authority of your content, or make them unsure which page should rank higher. As a result, your pages could compete against each other for rankings or even be excluded from search results.

Wasted Crawl Budget: Search engines have a 'crawl budget' for each website, which is the number of pages they'll scan at a given time. Duplicate content consumes this budget needlessly, leading to less efficient scanning of your site and potentially less frequent updates of your pages in the search index.

Reduced Page Authority: When multiple versions of a page exist, links to your content (like backlinks or internal links) get scattered across these duplicates. This scattering weakens the page authority that could have been concentrated on a single, authoritative page, thereby diminishing its potential ranking power.

Risk of Being Outranked by Copies: If others copy your content (known as scraping) and publish it on their sites, these copied pages could outrank your original content if search engines can't identify the source. This can reduce your site's visibility and traffic. It's important to ensure search engines can recognize your content as the original to prevent this.F