Question
I noticed that when I put products in multiple departments the content shows up twice on the website. Is that a problem? Will Google see that as duplicate content?
Answer
Yes technically it is duplicate content but not bad duplicate content. Let me explain.
The worst possible duplicate content is when you copy and paste content from another website. This is by far the worst duplicate content scenario because you are forcing Google, and other search engines, to pick between your content and where you copied that content from. If you copied the content from say your vendors website, well, Google will almost certainly see your vendor as the authority on the topic and show their page in the search results and not yours. This is extremely bad of course because you will simply not show up in Google in this case.
However, if you the content is yours, and you wrote it, then having duplicate content on your website is not so bad. Yes, Google may only show one product page when you've put a product in multiple departments or categories but that's ok because your product will still show up in the Google search results!
Matt Cutts, Google Search guru, does a nice job of explaining duplicate content on a website in this video.
We understand the field of SEO and Content Marketing is forever changing so please let us know if you have any more questions and we'll try to help out the best we can. Thank you.