Is duplicate page content bad for SEO?

SEO duplicate content

[geoffb77]

hi,

im currently building a site.. and hoping to optimise it as best as possible for SEO.
The site structure is consistent in that everypage contains a left column with the news in a right column with vacancies in (middle content will change on each page) <snip>

My question is, while this is consistent design wise will it be bad for SEO? ie. will Google penalise me for having areas of the same content on each page, as it may see each individual page as too similar to each other, therefore reduce the chance of it indexing a lot of the pages?

[edited by: caveman at 10:01 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed URL, per TOS. [/edit]

[peterdaly]

The real question is how much body content will you have on each page?

In my experience, if you have a couple hundred words or more of unique body content, you should be fine.

[caveman]

"Penalize" no, but those constant content areas will tend to be ignored, and/or may devalue the rest of the content, which takes up a lower percent of the total content on the page.

Constant nav is one thing (and that also tends to get factored out of the process of ranking the individual page). But a lot of repeated content on each page certainly puts more onus on you to ensure that each page is as unique as possible, including page titles, META tags, etc.