Duplicate Content Question

[jhinchcliffe]

Hey Everyone, I have a question regarding duplicate content.

If your site is penalized for duplicate content, is it just the pages with the content on it that are affected or is the whole site affected?

Thanks

[MattAntonino]

Duplicate content is not penalized. It may not all show up because it gets filtered but unless you're talking about scraping, there is no such thing.  As far as I know, nothing has changed from the original Google answer.

Straight from Google:

Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

There are some penalties that are related to the idea of having the same content as another site—for example, if you're scraping content from other sites and republishing it, or if you republish content without adding any additional value.

_Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. _

Non-malicious duplication is fairly common, especially since many <acronym title="content management systems">CMS</acronym>s don't handle this well by default. So when people say that having this type of duplicate content can affect your site, it's not because you're likely to be penalized; it's simply due to the way that web sites and search engines work.

Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.

In summary: Having duplicate content can affect your site in a variety of ways; but unless you've been duplicating deliberately, it's unlikely that one of those ways will be a penalty. This means that:

• You typically don't need to submit a reconsideration request when you're cleaning up innocently duplicated content.
• If you're a webmaster of beginner-to-intermediate savviness, you probably don't need to put too much energy into worrying about duplicate content, since most search engines have ways of handling it.

[EGOL]

The Panda algo detects sites that have lots of duplicate content that has been published on other websites.  It also detects trivial content.

If your site is judged to be low quality because your duplicate or trivial content exceeds a certain amount then all pages on your site can suffer a demotion in rankings.

You can read reliable information about Panda here....

http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/