arubicus - 8:00 am on Dec 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

"In the case of onsite duplication. If duplications happen on few pages, I guess its mostly a page penalty. "

That would be my guess. Well not a actually a penalty but more like being filtered.

Now the case with re-distributed articles I would have to say any single page that is re-distributed may get filtered rather than site-wide type penalty/exclusion. The effect of course will be on how many of your pages are re-distributed content. Which in my mind I have no problem with as long as the unique content is left undisturbed and only benefiting from links from other unique content on and off site. I can see how using re-distributed articles can be used to "push" up PR internally and in that case Google can just downgrade the effects of such pages. Distributing article elsewhere can also be used to manipulate PR in which G can (and I think does in some instances) downgrade for such things. This enables site owners to share information benefiting directly from site to site but not getting unfair benefit in G SERPS. I could be wrong though.

Now offsite duplication is a bit out of control in my opinion. It remains a full time job for many of us to keep up with all of that. And that is complete duplication of content (Full articles and even design). If G did crank up their dupe filter (off site occurances) it really can make a mess of things which would include many thousands of scraper sites scraping bits of content. (anyone with high ranking sites will surely have a scraper problem). I really have a hard time believing that G would intentionally penalize a site for such occurances. I believe they know that these scrapers are way out of control and that most webmasters cannot keep up with it all.

Now if G did a sudden downgrade of any benefit from links from scrapers can affect sites and make it appear to be a "penalty". Having links from such sites that once were keeping you in high the SERPS when taken away your site falls off the face of the planet.