Duplicate page content

[clickit2getwithit]

what is duplicate page content,  I have a dating site and it's got a groups area where the members can base there discussions in a category like for an example, night life, health and beauty, and such.   why would this cause a problem of duplicate page content and how would I fix it.  explained in the terms of a dummy.

[Andropenis_Australia]

Basically Google and other search engines will calculate the total number of words on a page and say for instance 20% of those words are written EXACTLY the same it will be classed as duplicate content.

Basically think of copying a paragraph, and pasting it on another page = duplicate content.

Hope that helps, all the best

[Dr-Pete]

The exact percentage is hard to say - I think we use 90-95%, but it depends on the content (ads vs. template vs. unique copy, etc.). I think the aspect that probably confuses most people is that Google doesn't care about duplicate pages, in the sense of physical files on your server. They care about URLs. So, if your home-page can be reached (and is linked to) at:

http://www.example.com

http://example.com

https://www.example.com

http://www.example.com/index.html

...and Google crawls/indexes all of these, they could look like duplicates. Any specific case can get tricky fast, to be honest. I have a mega-post about the subject here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world