Directories and duplicate content.

[OptioPublishing]

Part of our link building strategy for a dentist is to submit their site to several relevant directories. If I enter the same description in each directory, is it possible that Google will consider this duplicate content and prevent link juice from being passed back to the dentist's site?

Thanks folks,

Jason

[MichaelWeisbaum]

This doesn't fall into the duplicate content category.  Especially if the description is honestly describing what your site is.  All relevant and honest directories need a description of a site to accurately list them.  Also, Google does not determine if juice will pass from one site to another, it's up to the site to tell Google that.  They do this by adding rel="nofollow" to the page or link.

Straight from Google's Webmaster Tools help;

"Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link."

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web.

That pretty much says it there.  Hope this helps!

[MichealGooden]

You are in the clear duplicate content will only be an issue when Google is indexing your site.  I wouldn't worry with it when you are giving a description for a directory.

[ResslerMotors]

Matt Cutts claimed that they do not count some links just last month (Pubcon).  So, they can decide not to if the other site (not yours) is of too low of quality.