austtr - 11:56 pm on Dec 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

rewritten content. As my site became larger it was inevitable that something written about in 2010, would also be written about in 2011, and over time content was effectively - but unintentionally being duplicated.

The term "rewritten content" covers a very broad spectrum. At one end is the scraped, auto-generated trash that gets crammed into worthless blogs. There are sites that provide spinning techniques for generating and distributing numerous variants of the original.... which is often a cut and paste from the real original anyway. There is straight out word-for-word plagarism where one site steals from another.

IMO, the sooner this crud is driven from the internet, the better.... once Google can reliably figure out which is the original to leave alone!

But beyond those obvious examples, the interpretation of "rewritten content" seems to mean very different things to different people.

There seems to be an argument being put forward that if a subject has any coverage at all in existing sites, that any coverage of the same subject in new sites will be seen as "rewritten content", ie... duplicate content.

That's basically saying that every site after the original is at risk of being seen as duplicate content. If a pure affiliate site is simply rolling out the same product pages as the merchant, then yes, that is duplicate content and the affiliate site adds nothing to the web. If Wordpress blogs are be duplicated throughout the same site, then yes, that is duplicated content.

But if I write a new 300 page site, using my own unique style and presentation, are pages of that site going to be seen as "rewritten content" simply because Mary Smith wrote 6 paragraphs on the same subject back in 2003?

There is no possible way that Panda or any other algo function is going to smack a site just because there are other existing sites on the same subject.

I think for most people the term "rewritten content" means copying content from someone else's site and re-wording it so that it appears unique on your site. I guess what the OP and others are saying is that Google has become very good at recognising and smacking these pages.