I heard duplicate content is actually a myth - very confusing!

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Scott Clark: I have worked in franchise SEO for 10+ years and this is a tricky issue full of FUD. Google has always said that all 20 franchisees need completely different content so the consumer doesn`t have a poor experience. But what this causes you to have in the end is a ton of mediocre content due to the limited resources of local franchisees (and, frankly, their writing talent.)
  
  I have always pushed back in conference Q & A saying that a microsite in Miami for roof replacement will never be seen by a roof shopper in Memphis due to the way geographic Google ranking works in Local SEO (proximity #1) and that all we needed to do was concentrate on the highest quality, centralized and syndicated content we could offer. This is how to have the best user experience across the country.
  
  Alas, we watched as a competitor in our space was given a manual action due to this making my client panic and subsequently waste huge amounts of time producing needlessly unique content across the system. The customer experience was not improved and the quality of that content suffered.
  
  I also have asked about how we could use Schema (sameas, branch office, etc. or link structure to help Google understand that the franchisees are from the same entity, just geographically dispersed. (Though "dispersed" means something different in UK than US) The answer was always "each page needs unique, high quality content" and that syndicated content is not as good. Because Google.
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  Graham Southorn: Yes that`s exactly the issue. The main website ranks reasonably well for its own geographical location. But the geographically dispersed franchisees currently don`t rank in their local areas. Thanks for your comments - interesting.
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  Scott Clark: I should have clarified in my comments that it`s not just blog content I`m talking about. I`m also including things like services descriptions - where there is not a single reason on Earth for them to be different city-to-city.
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  Tim Capper: Duplicate content - is typically where Google finds them similar and decides to filter one out of results.
  
  Franchise landing pages or location pages are great if done well, especially with the GMB listing. A blog attaches to them each is fine BUT you will find it very difficult to produce unique content for each.
  
  You should explain this to client.
  
  You can still provide an attached blog section to each, but they all still display the one singular blog or category.
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  Graham Southorn: I see what you mean - essentially the topic will be the same, even if the words are different and the town/city is different.
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  Ammon Johns: If you have any issues, concerns, worries, or just general curiosity about Duplicate Content and how Google regard it, classify it, and deal with it, I still heartily recommend the one-hour detailed discussion of it between 2 Googlers (one Webmaster Guidance celebrity John Mueller, the other a Quality guy - the ones that actually check the algo results and deal with spam - Andrey Lipattsev) and a few well-known SEOs at https://youtu.be/KxCAVmXfVyI
  
  The short version is that there is no duplicate content PENALTY, but there is a strong filter that removes any duplicate but that with the highest authority scoring. If your version isn`t that top weighted one, that is going to feel like a penalty to you.
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  Graham Southorn: Many thanks that`s really useful - I`ll watch it. Just one more thing, as Columbo might say. How similar do articles need to be to be considered "duplicate"?
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  Ammon Johns: Graham Southorn the simple answer is that there is no precise answer to that. Perhaps not even Google engineers could tell you, given how much is now done by machine learning rather than by pre-built algorithms.
  
  The more interesting answer is that it`s kind of the wrong question. Knowing where algorithms are currently at, given the speed and regularity with which they get tweaked and change, is always less useful than knowing where they are aiming to get.
  
  What they are aiming to emulate in code is the same sort of decision making our own brains would make if we looked at the two (or more) examples. Does seeing both versions add anything to your knowledge and experience, or would it be annoying to be presented with both?
  
  Sometimes that is contextual. For example, If I am buying a new coffee maker of a particular make and model, and shopping for the best price, I don`t mind in the least that three different vendors have identical copy and sites that are effectively only different in colour scheme, so long as the price is different (which might be as little as 0.001% of the text).
  
  The video does address this, and Google`s view is that it isn`t about the percentages, the word counts, the shingling, and the page segmentation except as incidental tools to get to the point - if a user sees both versions, does that help them or waste their time? That then is the same yardstick you should use too.
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  Graham Southorn: Ammon Johns that`s the best explanation I`ve seen yet - thank you. Makes perfect sense.