How would Google treat a GitHub-Pages site, that is based on the same content as the GitHub repository itself?

Question

I've just created a GitHub Pages "site", out of one of my repositories on Github. Basically it's just a landing page, that pretty-prints my readme.md file(that is found in the repo). GitHub allows you to create such a site automatically.

I don't know too much about SEO, but i've heard that google takes into account "duplicate" content, as a "devaluation" factor.

So i was wondering: If google finds a Github repo page, that outputs some readme.md file, and then finds a Github.io(GitHub Pages) page, that has almost the identical content- would it treat it as some duplicate, and apply some kind of penalty to it?

Answer 1

The duplicate content penalty is a myth.

See: The myth of the duplicate content penalty - Search Engine Land

Google only "devalues" duplicate content in the sense that it will generally show the single most authoritative copy of a page in search results, if more than one copy exists on the internet. However, in the case of a GitHub repository versus a web page, it's quite likely that both will be shown in search since the purposes of the pages are so different.

In short, don't worry about duplicate content in this case. The very worst that could happen is for one of the pages to not rank.