Penalized for Duplicate Page Content?

[JimDirectMailCoach]

I have some high priority notices regarding duplicate page content on my website www.3000doorhangers.com

Most of the pages listed here are on our sample pages:

http://www.3000doorhangers.com/home/door-hanger-pricing/door-hanger-design-samples/

On the left side of our page you can go through the different categories.

Most of the category pages have similar text. We mainly just changed the industry on each page.

Is this something that google would penalize us for? Should I go through all the pages and use completely unique text for each page?

Any suggestions would be helpful

Thanks!

Andrea

[MikeRoberts]

Here's a two-fold answer: 1) As per Matt Cutts, duplicate content is not an issue unless it is spammy or keyword stuffed. Non-spammy duplicate content will mainly just be ignored (i.e. will not rank for anything). Too much thin content could get you hit during a panda refresh. http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459

2. It is always best to have good, unique and relevant content on any and all pages that you would actually like people to be able to find and/or access. If you have the manpower to spare to update the content then there's no good reason not to do so. If the pages aren't ranking well because of duplicate content and you don't care if those specific pages rank in the SERPs then you can always consider putting a NoIndex on them.

[RickyShockley]

Hi Andrea!

You will not be "penalized" for duplicate content, but Google probably won't be indexing pages seen as duplicates in their search results.

If you are optimizing those category pages for specific keywords, then you will need each category page to have content that is mostly original and unique on each. If you really only have one of those pages optimized and the others are there mainly to help the user on your site, you can use a rel=canonical tag to "tell" Google which version of the page (the specific category page) you wish to display in search results.

Let me know if that helps! If not, ill try to eloborate