Duplicate content

Anyone seen a penalty?

[btas2]

I occasionally exchange content with one other site. We have a similar theme, but are otherwise unrelated (different owners, different domains, different AdSense accounts etc.).

This results in a small percentage of my content (and that of the other site) being "duplicated", but it amounts only to a small (less than 5%) duplication of content. Some times I'll change some of the wording slightly, but an intelligent program would almost certainly flag the pages as being "suspicious" if it was looking for duplicate content.

Has anyone seen penalties from AdSense for doing something like this (not that I'm sure how you could tell given the information that they give us!). I don't think I'm seeing an effect as some of those pages are quite good at generating adsense income, but like I said, how do you tell?

I suppose it could also result in a small hit in search ranking, though again, it would be probably be hard to tell.

[psychdoc]

I have a couple of pages with very similar information on two sites sharing some the same type of readers and am not aware of any penalties. I have some interest in this topic also and do not monitor the pages well enough to know for sure. Does anyone else have any information to share on this topic?

[howiejs]

I don't believe Adsense as a program is concerned about this - as I see it all day long ....

Google as a search engine does care and will not always rank duplicate content

[OptiRex]

but an intelligent program would almost certainly flag the pages as being "suspicious" if it was looking for duplicate content.

I'm going to try and be careful how I write this since I do not want to openly reveal this information since I learnt it through experimentation.

It is entirely possible to have precisely duplicate content ranking at the top of the SERPs incorporating Adsense, not be penalised and not be a scraper site.