Is a small amount of duplicate content a problem?

Duplicate content : is it o.k. in small doses?

[Clay Wimberley]

We are getting ready to launch a new version of our web site and there are some pages wich have a little bit of duplicate content. For instance, the first half of our "about us" page has the same information as our "contact us" page. Also, we have some product descriptions that show up on dynamically generated pages (after doing a product search) that have some of the same text that is on the main page describing the product. we don't have any pages that are complete duplicates and the vast majority of our pages are compmletely different. Is this small amount of duplicate content a problem? If so, how does google penalize you. do they decrease your page rank, possibly ban your site, or what. thanks.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

In my experience this should not constitute a problem. On a couple of my sites I place a common paragraph of text at the top of each page describing the services offered and it does not seem to have done me any harm.

[kashyap rajput]

i dont think there may be any problem of duplicate content.

kashyap

[Marcia]

What percentage of the content of the page is it?

[Clay Wimberley]

In the worst cases, about 35% of a page contains about 80% of the content from a smaller page.