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A question I posted was voted to close. On looking at the possible duplicate answer, I found that the questions could have arisen due to completely different backgrounds. But the answers were similar. If I googled it, I would not have ended up on that possible duplicate answer. And even while posting, after typing in the title I did find none of the questions to the theme of my question.

So I was just wondering if the moderation had any other motive? Like linking those two questions?

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  • I guess this is a simple case of "hey, I've seen something related before...". Especially when the user voting as such, has the accepted answer on the other question.
    – Bart
    Oct 25, 2013 at 13:52
  • In addition to that. Its also possible that that user was concentrating more on the question tag...
    – deostroll
    Oct 25, 2013 at 13:56
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    Just to make sure, you're asking "does moderation aid some search algorithm", not "is moderation aided by some search algorithm", right? The latter may be assumed by some people. The former is pretty trivial - marking a question as a duplicates allows that, if you find either (through any means), you'll get all the best answers posted on the original. It doesn't, as far as I know, really affect searches (except in that regard). Oct 25, 2013 at 14:12

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The rationale for not simply deleting duplicate questions is related to SEO, but not necessarily the rationale for closing them as dupes in the first place.

The purpose of closing them is to avoid people wasting the effort of writing essentially the same answer in more than one place, as well as having different answers in more than one place where they won't be seen together.

You might also be interested in: Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication

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  • @Al: thanks for tracking down my source so I didn't have to :)
    – Wooble
    Oct 25, 2013 at 14:18

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