I am sure you have run across a web page that returns nothingness in the past. Yes, a page with no content, no navigation, just a blank white page. This may be the result of a server issue, HTML issue or a security prevention method gone bad.

A Google Webmaster Help has one such webmaster who had this issue and it led to serious Google ranking consequences.

The issue is, I am a bit surprised by Google’s JohnMu response. Instead of saying that because Google could not determine the content of the page, they decided to remove it. He said, Google sees multiple blank/empty HTML pages on the site and thus considers them to be duplicate to each other.

John said:

I would think Google wouldn’t consider them duplicate, but rather throw them into a bucket of error pages and recrawl them on a schedule.

Maybe I am misunderstanding. But I felt the difference between an bad error page and a duplicate content issue with a blank HTML page was an interesting difference for SEOs to chew on.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.