While we have known for a very long time about the duplicate content filter for written content, it wasn’t quite as clear if the same thing applies to other types of content such as images and video.

The question came up specifically about videos and if a website could benefit from uploading the identical video to YouTube and multiple other video sites, or whether the search would pick only one of them to show.

John Mueller tackled the question in today’s Google Webmaster hangout.

We do try to understand when something is a duplicate and treat it appropriately.  So we do that with textual content, webpages for example, we try to recognize if something is a duplicate and filter it out when we show it in search.  We do it with images where we can and we do try to do that with video as well.

So if you go and host your video on a number of different services that doesn’t mean it is going to show up 5 times instead of once in the search results.

So if your SEO plan involved uploading identical images or videos to numerous sites and services, you will not be able to block out a ton of search results with identical copies of a video – or images – on multiple sites.