Duplicate Content Question

Penalty site wide or for individual page?

[CWebguy]

On the topic of duplicate content penalties, I have always wondered: Is duplicate penalty a side wide penalty (even if only on one page) or is it just ministered to the "culprit" page(s)?

Also, is this penalty for the life time of the site, or until either the page (or content) is removed from site or any other sites on the web with the content are unindexed or the content is removed from them? If your site is unintentionally hit with a penalty, is this a permant thing or temporary?

What do you guys think?

[Quadrille]

There is NO duplicate content penalty. Period.

Just that some SEs choose to improve their listings by simply only listing one version of a repeated page.

Remove all duplicates from the WWW, and the one remaining page will appear (in the absence of other problems, of course!).

[CWebguy]

Interesting, well that's a relief. (Of course they also told me that meta tags don't matter anymore, and know they say they do, so go figure :)

So I'm guessing winner goes to highest page rank?

[Quadrille]

Yes, some meta tags do matter ... ;)

It's not determined simply by page rank. If a site has 'trust status' - and don't ask me to define that - then it wins; but if two sites are are broadly similar, there's no logic at all to those outside Google - could be the first, the first found by the spider .... or not.

I've seen pages elbowed out by a duplicate page, and I've seen new dupes from apparently 'better' sites fail to get indexed.

There's no clear logic ... unless anyone out there knows different.