Duplicate content within site

penalized or not?

[Namaste]

I just came off reading two great threads on duplicate content:
[webmasterworld.com...]
and
[webmasterworld.com...]

however, I can't seem to find a major discussion on duplicate content within the same site. Is it being penalized?

[duckhunter]

I have two areas of my site that house the same content with minor differences in the navigation and did not have any problems. My rankings have stayed well in the top 5 for 2-3 keyword searches.

I had the same gut feeling about duplicate content so in an effort to play fair (and not get banned), I took one of the two sections (the old one) and added the meta tag for googlebot:
<META NAME="googlebot" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

That way GG will only index the "new" side of my site and not see the duplicate content.

[mrguy]

I think in reference to duplicate content with-in the same domain, Google will drop one of them without penalizing the other one.

[killroy]

The question is how heavily is the dropped version penalised, and how soon will it recover once the content is changed...

SN

[Namaste]

Has anyone here experienced an actual penalty for internal duplicate content

[duckhunter]

Hence the META tag. I get to pick which one is dropped.