How Far Does The Duplicate Content Penalty Go?

Is it just for individual pages, or the whole site?

[jretzer]

If I have a site that has several pages of press releases that are printed elsewhere, does the whole site suffer a penalty, or just the pages with the duplicate content?

On a similar note, if I "borrow" pages from one of my own sites and run them on another of my own sites (I have two sites with some crossover topics), what is the duplicate content penalty?

[beren]

Pages.

[briggidere]

hi beren,

i have had a problem with this.
One of our partner sites stole 18 pages of content from us and put it on their site.
In a short period of time the whole domain got dropped from the index, not just those pages. The weird thing is is that it kept pages from our forum listed, but not the main pages in the site.

does anyone know roughly how the duplicate filter actually works? Does google just credit the older domain for the content and drop the other domains, or could our partner sneakily have reported us for duplicate content and got google to ban the domain.

Any help would be magic

briggidere