smells_so_good - 10:26 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

I don't think the dup content is necessarily about items like menus, definitions, numbers, etc. that may be repeated on each page, UNLESS, that is the bulk of the page content.

Every page on my site offers a static menu at the top, and generic site links at the footer. That's nearly 1500 pages of duplicate content? Nope, not at all. I use separate pages to elaborate on some basic information - my About Page, Contact info, site policies. To my knowledge I have not triggered any dup content filters, except where I mentioned earlier about some pages going supplemental. My site certainly is not penalized in any way as I'm still at the top of the SERP's. It would be foolish for Google to consider such things as dup content, UNLESS, that's all I have on page after page (can you say stub?). Take a look at this site (WebmasterWorld) - each page is built around a template with identical info in the same place on each page. Just like mine, or vice-versa.

A few other things may help to reduce the chance of pages looking alike to G-bot. Good page design includes proper use of meta tags. Keywords, descriptions and page titles should reflect the page content. This thread offers a few other really good gems about how to reduce the duplication, while still displaying the content on the page. (I'm almost ready to hire myself a poet and put a couple of hundred pages back in the SERP's)

It takes a little imagination to describe different products that are essentially the same. How many ways can you say a bottle is about 10 inches tall and and made from plastic? I personally think a lot of duplicate content on the web is intentional, created by lazy people with no imagination or ambition other that to create more useless content. I know that my own boilerplate pages suffer from a dearth of content, and so they probably look very similar to an algo, even though they are uniquely different to a set of human eyes.