There is no duplicate content penalty

[johnnie]

Straight from google's webmaster tools blog [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com].

Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

...

But most site owners whom I hear worrying about duplicate content aren't talking about scraping or domain farms; they're talking about things like having multiple URLs on the same domain that point to the same content. Like www.example.com/skates.asp?color=black&brand=riedell and www.example.com/skates.asp?brand=riedell&color=black. Having this type of duplicate content on your site can potentially affect your site's performance, but it doesn't cause penalties.

So with that issue cleared out of the way, can we get to sleep now?

[steveb]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[g1smd]

Sure, no penalty, but still plenty of ways to screw up your listings and rankings, by hitting some filters, as discussed in the other thread.

This is also relevant: [webmasterworld.com...]

[tedster]

It has become much too common for webmasters to call any drop in ranking a "penalty" - and using that word causes confusion. I've heard people who fell from #1 to #3 talk about that as a penalty and wondering if they should submist a reconsideration request.

At any rate, let's take this current discussion of duplicate content to the thread [webmasterworld.com] that steveb pointed out, so we have it all in one place.