Duplicated privacy policy pages

[Jamie.Stevens]

I work for a small web agency and I noticed that many of the sites that we build have been using the same privacy policy. Obviously it can be a bit of a nightmare to write a unique privacy policy for each client so is Google likely to class this as duplicate content and result in a penalty? They must realise that privacy policies are likely to be the same or very similar as most legal writing tends to be!

I can block the content in robots.txt or meta no-index it if necesarry but I just wanted to get some feedback to see if this is necessary!

[GPainter]

Google has mentioned boiler plate duplicate content isn't the worse and is generally just ignored by Google but if you did want to be safe you can do as you suggested

Blocking robots / no index (same result)

rel=canonical tag to one main site with your policy this way you still get some form of link juice.

Do nothing- It's very rare if Google would give you a penalty for just having duplicated privacy policy not to mention I assume you would be tweaking it with the name of the site etc. any way.

[paints-n-design]

In our Agency we have thousands of clients with the same privacy policy (in german we have to have two of them called: impressum & datenschutz) - mosty the same content no penalty.

You can noindex it (some people do that) you can do nothing - there wont be a penalty for that. And privacy polciy sites are not the pages you focus to rank with in a tuff keyword area  
Think thats nearby what pixel by pixel said. But I would say - no penalty for your domain for sure.

[seowoody]

Agreed. This won't result in a penalty.

To add; as most privacy policies are linked from the footer, so you might want to add a rel="nofollow" to the link.