Duplicate content site not penalized

[KenSchaefer]

Was reviewing a site, www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com, and noted that even though there are over 50,000 total issues found by automated crawls, including 3000 pages with duplicate titles and 6,000 with duplicate content this site still ranks high for primary keywords.  The same essay's worth of content is pasted at the bottom of every single page.  What gives, Google?

[seoman10]

This is a common scenario, I would take issues found by crawling tools with a pinch of salt - A lot of them flag up errors that aren't actually a major problem.

Search engines aren't crawling the web to find problems with your site, they are crawling the web to find the most relevant content and deliver it to the person that requests it.

As far as I'm aware there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.  But there is an exception, if you breach copyright you could be in legal trouble.  Additionally Google does have a pirated content removal process, if you find a copied piece of content that breaches copyright you can submit it and it will most likely be removed completely from the search engine.

If you are talking about duplicate content on your own site, it isn't a major problem and Google will still pick up the pages and try and deliver the best content to the search except you are doing yourself a disservice.  If you have duplicate content on your own site put a bit of effort into crafting content and targeting different keywords.

[KenSchaefer]

Thanks SEOMAN.

My issue is that this purposeful duplicate content tactic is helping www.adspecialtyproductscatalog.com rank higher for a keyword like "ad specialty products" than http://www.advertisingproducts.net/, the former, using the same 4,000 words on every single page of it's site.

So if the goal is to rank #1 for the highest searched keyword in my category, should one employ this content tactic as part of their SEO efforts?