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I was reading this post here.

But it does not answer my question fully. I have 2 URL's display that the same content, but contain the exact same query string parameters, the URL's are pretty much the same, except for the order of the parameters. Would these 2 URL's be considered duplicate content by Google?

www.example.com/products?category=A&category=B

www.example.com/products?category=B&category=A

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  • How a page is queried has nothing to do with anything regarding duplicate content. Duplicate content is determined by search engines using semantic scoring of content and when two pages are found to be statistically significantly similar in the matrices/vectors. It is content as determined by the HTML DOM model removing headers, footers, and sidebars, etc. and not markup and not anything else.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 24, 2015 at 15:59
  • Thanks! But here I read that the URL is a factor in whether content can be marked as duplicate: moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content, or am I misinterpreting this?
    – Adam
    Nov 24, 2015 at 16:06
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    Sorta. The URI (URL is actually the http - domainname.tld while the URI is the path and file) can create scenarios where duplicate content is created. Duplicate content is determined based upon the content only. There is some level of decision making in what to show in the SERPs based upon the URI, however. This is probably where the confusion comes in.
    – closetnoc
    Nov 24, 2015 at 16:13

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www.example.com/products?category=A&category=B
www.example.com/products?category=B&category=A

These two URLs are technically different. So if they are both available for indexing and return exactly the same content then yes, it's duplicate content.

If those two URLs return the same content then Google is only going to return one of them in the SERPs. (It would be a bad user experience if Google returned both and this is what Google is trying to avoid.) But which URL should Google return in the search results? Even if Google does determine that they are really "the same", it can still only return one of them (or at least it should only return one of them). AB or BA?

The question you've already linked to covers duplicate content in more detail. Whether it is really a "problem" for you and how to resolve it:

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